The ongoing situations in Iran, China, and elsewhere demonstrate the potential for social networking communications to confront corrupt totalitarian impulses run amok. The problem has been that conventional internet architecture continues to include network access "choke points", which allow national governments the power to shut down global communications to and from their constituents.
As long as dynamic, realtime services such as Twitter must operate through telephone central office switchgear and their IP traffic flows through telecom carrier network access points, individual liberty will remain hostage to the power of tyrants. Fortunately, technology enables us to construct an alternative, beyond the reach of bureaucratic censors, in any jurisdiction in the world.
A global civil liberties movement, in cooperation with high technology industry (and some greedy multinational media conglomerate with deep pockets) could rapidly design, build, and deploy a new constellation of dozens of small satellites which would forever end the government's control over the thoughtstream of their peoples... (more)
A network of identical, mass produced microsatellites, coupled with cheap, handheld burst transceivers, could be developed which would allow users to send Twitter-like (or actual) "Tweets", together with images, audio, or brief video clips directly, without going through any terrestrial infrastructure subject to national governmental control.
Nothing new needs to be invented to make this happen; all of the enabling technology already exists, and all of the components necessary to engineer such a system are already available, from multiple vendors.
Such a "TWITSAT" system would relay high speed data bursts from users to a geographically distributed network of ground stations, simultaneously, through which the text, images, audio, or video would be displayed, on country specific websites, each mirrored on multiple servers around the world. As a result, no country could ever shut down the flow of information from its people to the rest of the world.
Simultaneously, each handheld transceiver would receive a continuous stream of global political content, organized geographically, such that users see what their countrymen, neighboring peoples, and the world at large have to say about conditions and events in their homeland - in realtime.
To optimize the size and affordability of the handheld - which could easily come in at <$50.US - the uplink would be conducted as brief, high speed, high power burst transmissions, while the downlink would stream at relatively low data rates on a continuous basis.</p>
This scheme would require no large antenna, with user transmissions too fast and directional to be effectively traced by host governments. Users would enter text, capture images or video, or record audio, as events occur, and then would activate transmission when cued to do so by an LED triggered by the satellite constellation.
Units would have USB ports to enable data to be exchanged with PCs, but would have built in camera, microphone, headset jack, and keypad.
The downlink, a lite-graphic html page feed with only essential images, would be composed and delivered on a periodic basis, with the user alerted to the complete reception of new content blocks by an LED triggered by the satellite constellation.
One could envision the system being funded through a $10 lifetime subscription fee being included in the price of the handhelds, coupled with the revenue from advertising inserted in the downlink bitstream, and on the websites through which the uploaded user content is ultimately displayed, including video commercials between the various user clips being presented. Since the users are localized by the system to the level of the metropolitan area, advertising can be targetted in a commercially viable manner; including, for example, restaurant coupons.
At the global level, TWITSAT could offer special "high access" subscriptions to major news organizations, television networks, even intelligence agencies, enabling them to monitor very local events around the world at a highly granular level. There are perhaps two dozen such organizations for whom this participation would be a "must have" utility, even at annual subscription rate of $100,000 or more. With contemporary PC based microsatellite interface technology, that $2.4 Million annual revenue stream would be more than adequate to subsidize the entire administration of the space segment of the architecture.
As the post-bankruptcy success stories of both ORBCOMM and Iridium both indicate, a properly designed business model and low cost user hardware can produce some very effective microsatellite applications. Multiple independent vendors demonstrate that portable user transceivers can be made compact and inexpensive, and packaged in a variety of ways for different applications.
Could, say, $10,000,000 be raised, globally, for political freedom in China generally, and Tibet in particuar? Almost certainly, and probably entirely from successful ex-pat Chinese alone. Is there $2,500,000 among the Miami Cuban community to enlighten their homeland? $1,000,000 among exiled Burmese gem traders? $500,000 from those sympathetic to the plight of Zimbabwe, and $250,000 for those in Darfur? Could Iranian businessmen and professionals abroad raise $5,000,000 to kick down the door of official censorship in their homeland? Without a doubt, and likely within a matter of days.
Collectively, and with the sponsorship of some international human rights organizations (Amnesty Int'l, Doctors w/o Borders, etc.) and a globally minded Billionaire or two (Soros? Turner? Gates?), it is reasonable to think that the entire cost of system deloyment could be raised via charitable contributions. Assuming a total project deployment budget of $266 Million - which is comparable with the original Orbcomm and Iridium deployments, and represents $1,000,000 for each of the 266 individual countries recognized by the CIA Factbook, spread over a period of ten years, philanthropic underwriting of the entire capital cost is a realistic possibility. Since these two prior systems were built, all costs involved, from the satellite electronics, to launch services, to ground segment, have declined by at least one order of magnitude.
If other payloads of opportunity can be identified to share the missions with TWITSAT, either on the launch vehicles at initial deployment, or on each satellite bus itself, for permanent cohabitation on orbit, then the total net cost can be dramatically reduced. For example, each spacecraft could host a multispectral camera/instrument suite for environmental monitoring in connection with realtime climate assessment, and national Carbon emission quota verification. Each spacecraft could carry the cremains of political activists or humanitarian figures from a group of countries, sponsored by local donations.
In addition, the dozens of TWITSAT satellites could each host several of the much smaller CUBESATs, developed by universities in each country, as part of a global program of student collaboration to promote international understanding. Since university students are usually on the forefront of political upheaval, building bridges between student groups from countries around the world, and the online communities this would facilitate, would add a human dimension to the construction of the system. As students work with new friends at universities around the world, extreme political events, such as those in Iran today, or China, Burma, Zimbabwe, and Sudan in the recent past, will take on a more personal dimension. Those in each country will have international partners in whom they trust, and who trust them and the veracity of their reports on domestic conditions of global importance.
Once a constellation of TWITSATS is deployed into Low Earth Orbit, never again can any national government hope to silence its people from speaking to the world, or hide the world's truth within its borders. Because such a constellation is inherently redundant, even successfully 'shooting down' a satellite as it passes overhead will have no meaningful impact in censoring the flow of information. Another TWITSAT would always be passing overhead momentarily, from a different vector. The cost and logistics required to intercept any significant fraction of the constellation would be far beyond the capability of any government but the United States, and spares could be kept on standby status, at multiple launch sites around the world, ready for rapid deployment in the event of a major crisis - such as Iran today.
Permanently deleting official state censorship from the human memepool is a worthy and attainable objective. Let's do it now, while the censors are in Tehran and Beijing; by the time they are in Washington and London, it will be too late to organize such an alternative.