WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.960 Compared to the golden age of piracy, online bootlegging is pretty tame. 00:00:03.960 --> 00:00:08.200 Your average modern pirate has never had to fear the rope and, if they've got scurvy, 00:00:08.200 --> 00:00:12.640 it's probably unrelated to the nine seasons of illicit Seinfeld sitting on their hard drive. 00:00:12.640 --> 00:00:17.360 There are, however, places around the globe where the internet is heavily restricted and 00:00:17.360 --> 00:00:22.280 uncensored access to all that the digital world has to offer is provided by hidden networks 00:00:22.280 --> 00:00:28.160 of smugglers, risking imprisonment or worse, to bring their clientele the dankest memes 00:00:28.160 --> 00:00:33.200 and latest Hollywood blockbusters on disks and flash drives, effectively creating an 00:00:33.200 --> 00:00:36.200 underground, offline internet. 00:00:36.200 --> 00:00:40.240 This is partly because adoption of the internet has been incredibly uneven. 00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:46.800 By the year 2000, only 5.8% of the global population was connected to the worldwide web, which 00:00:46.800 --> 00:00:50.080 included 43% of US residents. 00:00:50.080 --> 00:00:56.320 Even two decades later in 2020, only 60% of the world was online compared to 91% of the 00:00:56.320 --> 00:01:01.320 United States, but that's not because people in those places don't want the internet. 00:01:01.320 --> 00:01:06.240 These gaps on the map are typically due to some combination of poverty, remoteness, 00:01:06.240 --> 00:01:11.440 corruption, and the intentional suppression of information by local authorities. 00:01:11.440 --> 00:01:16.600 But the development of dense, durable, and most importantly, portable storage options 00:01:16.600 --> 00:01:20.880 like flash drives means that digital media can go anywhere that people can. 00:01:20.880 --> 00:01:24.480 I don't know what kind of download speeds people are getting in downtown Pyongyang, 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:30.000 but a small backpack has a theoretical carrying capacity of thousands and thousands of terabytes 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:33.560 of highly illegal K-dramas and American sitcoms. 00:01:33.560 --> 00:01:38.400 Now details are scarce due to the danger involved, but many North Korean defectors report having 00:01:38.400 --> 00:01:42.000 watched pirated Western content before leading the country. 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:47.440 Films like James Bond, Titanic, or Pretty Woman, the definition of decadent Western 00:01:47.440 --> 00:01:52.680 media. Getting caught with Russian or Bollywood films could result in three years in a labor 00:01:53.200 --> 00:01:58.000 But getting caught with contraband from America or South Korea could mean a far longer sentence 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:03.280 or even execution. But repressive policies like these haven't stopped people from getting ahold of the content 00:02:03.280 --> 00:02:09.480 they want. One of the best documented data smuggling networks is Cuba's Paquete Semanal, or the 00:02:09.480 --> 00:02:16.880 Weekly Package. Cuba got its first internet connection in September 1996, a 64 kilobit per second link 00:02:16.880 --> 00:02:23.720 to the US mainland courtesy of Sprint. After that, however, efforts to connect Cubans languished for years. 00:02:23.720 --> 00:02:30.680 In part, this was due to the weak state of the Cuban economy. The fall of the Soviet Union had left them with few international allies, and the US 00:02:30.680 --> 00:02:34.880 embargo made infrastructure and even basic hardware very expensive. 00:02:34.880 --> 00:02:39.480 The Cuban government was leery of both foreign investment and the possibility that advanced 00:02:39.480 --> 00:02:43.160 telecommunications might be used to turn the population against them. 00:02:43.160 --> 00:02:47.240 In a country where all magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television channels are 00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:51.680 state-owned, if the government doesn't invest in a big telecommunications project, 00:02:51.680 --> 00:02:59.600 it's probably not getting done. So by 2012, only 21% of Cubans were using the internet, compared to 43% of Dominicans 00:02:59.600 --> 00:03:07.040 who were connected to the internet in the same year. And it wasn't great internet either, relying on telephone lines and Soviet satellites until 00:03:07.040 --> 00:03:10.920 the first fiber optic cable was finally activated in 2013. 00:03:10.920 --> 00:03:15.240 Even then, bandwidth for personal use was rationed and fairly expensive, so you had 00:03:15.240 --> 00:03:19.720 to go to the government-run internet cafe if you wanted to read Jujinshi, and the download 00:03:19.720 --> 00:03:25.120 speeds were terrible. But did everyday Cubans just accept the shoddy infrastructure provided them, or did they 00:03:25.120 --> 00:03:30.760 take matters into their own hands? We'll tell you, but first, our officially mandated sponsor. 00:03:30.760 --> 00:03:34.960 After it became legal for Cubans to buy a personal computer without a permit in 2008, 00:03:34.960 --> 00:03:41.560 the market for international media boomed. Infrastructure-like satellite dishes became easier to get a hold of, and some Cubans installed 00:03:41.560 --> 00:03:44.720 them on roofs, hidden inside fake water tanks. 00:03:44.720 --> 00:03:49.920 Digital storage was also now cheap, durable, and compact, making dissemination of uncensored 00:03:49.920 --> 00:03:55.400 media from the United States and other nations a simple matter of flash drives trading hands. 00:03:55.400 --> 00:04:00.240 Since then, the weekly package has circulated throughout Cuba, featuring a constantly updated 00:04:00.240 --> 00:04:06.080 roster of movies, music, software news, internet videos, and even ads for local businesses. 00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:09.640 The notable exceptions are politics and pornography. 00:04:09.640 --> 00:04:14.040 That's because, though there are severe penalties for selling smuggled material at all, it's 00:04:14.040 --> 00:04:18.120 easier to avoid becoming a law enforcement priority if you stick to illegal copies of 00:04:18.120 --> 00:04:22.600 Die Hard and leave the Manchurian candidate and Girls Gone Wild out of it. 00:04:22.600 --> 00:04:28.160 By at least 2017, this system was so sophisticated that a film could debut in the United States 00:04:28.160 --> 00:04:32.240 on a Friday and be watched in Havana the following Monday. 00:04:32.240 --> 00:04:36.800 The vast majority of Cubans are aware of this system and, in fact, have used it themselves. 00:04:36.800 --> 00:04:40.800 Some show up to distributors with flash drives for the newest episodes of their favorite shows, 00:04:40.800 --> 00:04:44.720 while others bring Karabite hard drives and transfer the entire package of new material 00:04:44.720 --> 00:04:50.200 for that week. Concerned about the effect that mindless and violent American content was having on the 00:04:50.200 --> 00:04:55.000 general public, in 2014 the Cuban government actually tried to set up their own competing 00:04:55.000 --> 00:05:00.520 package of pirated media called Mochila, or Backpack, filled with government-approved 00:05:00.520 --> 00:05:04.880 movies, music, and educational material. It was extremely unpopular. 00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:08.520 What, isn't that everyone's favorite pastime? 00:05:08.520 --> 00:05:12.880 Using Spanish translations of Crash Course and The Iliad with a seal of approval from 00:05:12.880 --> 00:05:18.400 Castro? In this era, it wasn't unusual for small groups of tech-savvy Cubans to create isolated 00:05:18.400 --> 00:05:23.240 local networks by running cables from roof to roof in their neighborhoods and repurposing 00:05:23.240 --> 00:05:27.840 consumer-grade routers and personal computers to act as nodes in a mesh network with no 00:05:27.840 --> 00:05:34.520 central server. The largest such network was the Havana Street Network, or SNET, created in 2011 by the fusion 00:05:34.520 --> 00:05:42.520 of several of these smaller networks. At its peak, SNET was estimated to have around 100,000 individual IP addresses, despite having 00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:46.520 no direct connection to the outside world. What did they use it for? 00:05:46.520 --> 00:05:50.280 Well, the same thing that the rest of us were using the Internet for in 2012. 00:05:50.280 --> 00:05:55.520 They had forums, blogs, social media, video streaming, restaurant reviews, and locally 00:05:55.520 --> 00:05:58.560 hosted copies of external sites like Wikipedia. 00:05:58.560 --> 00:06:02.720 Some even used it to play hacked versions of online games like World of Warcraft or 00:06:02.720 --> 00:06:07.360 Dota, really pushing the definition of LAN party on the one side, but not quite doing 00:06:07.360 --> 00:06:12.440 MMO justice on the other. Being part of SNET meant strict, self-enforced rules. 00:06:12.440 --> 00:06:15.800 No politics, no pornography, no controversy. 00:06:15.800 --> 00:06:18.920 Not if they wanted to keep their network free from government interference. 00:06:18.920 --> 00:06:24.560 But it wasn't to last. The Cuban government has been expanding, officially sanctioned Internet access as part of its 00:06:24.560 --> 00:06:29.240 development strategy, and in 2019, the Havana Street Network and its infrastructure were 00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:35.240 absorbed into the state system. As of 2021, 71% of Cubans had some kind of Internet access. 00:06:35.240 --> 00:06:39.160 It's becoming both cheaper and easier to connect to the outside world, and sooner or 00:06:39.160 --> 00:06:42.960 later this will be the standard way that they get movies and music from abroad, rather than 00:06:42.960 --> 00:06:50.600 buying a burnt CD off a teenager on a street corner. Still, as long as there are some blank patches in the worldwide web, in some places the Internet 00:06:50.600 --> 00:06:55.960 will look more like this. 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