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Bringing Bandwidth To Iraq

Posted by kdawson on from the blood-bombs-and-bullets dept.

jemevans sends us a link to his nonfiction tale of two California cypherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune and bring the Internet to Iraq. A much abridged version ran in Wired a while back. From the original: "Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions 'drug deals' — but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old."

1 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Not the only one by Kizzle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This guy did an excellent presentation at Notacon about running a non profit isp in iraq. Available in mp3 or video format.

    mp3 aviDavid Coughanour - HajjiNets: Running an ISP in a War Zone

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    Hacker Media