U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

[babylonsister]

So far ahead of everyone (Updated)

No wonder half the country hates Barack Obama. He is like a president from the year 2050, trying to govern a country stuck in 1950. This NYT front page story is just amazing:
http://blackwaterdog.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/so-far-ahead-of-everyone/



U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

Keith Berkoben/Fab Folk

Volunteers have built a wireless Internet around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, from off-the-shelf electronics and ordinary materials. More Photos »

By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF
Published: June 12, 2011


The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=1&hp

[drm604]

1. You have to love this!

The modern equivalent of Radio Free Europe.

And there's another aspect to this. As these technologies are developed, some of them will be used by people right here at home. It's going to become more and more difficult for any government to censor communications without shutting down commerce completely.