U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

[xchrom]

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

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.

[SpiralHawk]

1. The global InfoWar is on

all over the freaking place...

[xchrom]

2. ain't that the truth. nt

[Warrior Dash]

3. They talk about shutting it down one week and freeing it up the next...

Who knows...

[Distant Observer]

4. There is a hugely fund black budget information environment-control project focused on social nets

So it is imperative the the vehicle for that campaign -- wireless internet -- be maintained by whatever means necessary.

[Fumesucker]

5. I'm sure this device will be dispatched to Bahrain posthaste..

Isn't it odd how _some_ dissidents are more equal than others?

[SpiralHawk]

6. "All dissidents are equal." - Dissi Q. Dent (B.O.*)

"But some dissidents are more equal than others." - Dissi Q. Dent (B.O.*)

* B.O. = Black Ops

[Distant Observer]

7. In Bahrain a vast number of the opposition have simply dissapeared - with US approval

Where every they are, the information conflict is over.

The "Coalition" between the GCC and the US was very effective there.