Goals of the ChokePoint Project

[Chris Pinchen]

ChokePoint Project

This project is meant for people curious about transparency and control of the networking technologies, their use and abuse by nation states and corporations leading towards new tool sets being produced to distribute connectivity beyond traditional powers. Telephony and the Internet have had a huge impact on society, both positive and negative. Following the uprisings in the Middle East in 2011, where the Internet was “turned off”, we aim to provide a close-to real-time map of leverage points expressed through the powerful medium of data visualization, a map which web users can see what’s happening across the pipes, cables and transmission towers of the internet at any given time in relation to traffic being choked, filtered or tampered with. We also aim to support research and public discourse covering these topics to deepen understanding and further knowledge.

 

Goals

1.  Build a real-near time map that shows citizens directly the current state of the internet (its pipes and connections) and traffic flows, a dynamic responsive resource letting users easily tap on different countries, cities and determine their own levels of surveillance (where possible).

2. Explore new models for distributed Internet infrastructures for circumventing control by autocratic governments in favor of supporting local communities of people globally to possibly own and maintain their own connectivity.  We also intend to explore where networked technologies might evolve into over the coming decades and what implications these may have on our ideas of nation states, corporations and citizens/groups of all shape and size.