The scheme will rely on participation from Internet users who deploy an agent on their computers to create a distributed watchdog system, Lee says. Had such a system been deployed in Egypt during the recent uprising, it would have discovered right away that the government was essentially shutting down the Internet there. "We will know instantly when a government or ISP starts to block traffic, tamper with search results, even alter web-based information in order to spread propaganda," Lee says.

Data from individuals using the tools will likely be aggregated by a neutral third party, such as a university research team, and reported back to end users so they can see whether other users are having similar network experiences. The more users that take advantage of the system, the more accurate it will become.

Among the challenges the team has in front of it is building tools that won’t be blocked or filtered by governments or ISPs. Feamster says one possibility to circumvent this might even include pulling a page from the way peer-to-peer based botnets work to elude security measures. "Could we borrow some of the design ideas from some of that type of infrastructure to build a resilient indication network that sends us good messages?"

Encouraging users to install the tools his team develops will be a challenge, Feamster acknowledges. The team is working to make the tools really easy to use, and a preliminary version takes the form of a Google Chrome extension (not that this is a Google-specific technology effort).

It’s also possible that by encouraging enterprise IT shops to adopt the tools that broader use of the tools will result, Feamster says. The tools Georgia Tech is developing might help system admins troubleshoot by figuring out whether performance problems are caused by internal or external networks, he says.