Sunday, June 12, 2011

Sneaky new ways to keep the Net up.

H/T to wifi LunchboxGuy for this NY Slimes story, seems Uncle Sam has been spending some money on creating sneaky ways to keep the Internet up and available for people in places like Egypt and Syria when the government shuts it down.

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.

Sadly the Times article is seriously low on details, I guess they don't want the "secrets" to get out.

The Phantom

3 comments:

WiFi Lunchbox Guy said...

Some details of kit at engadget.

The New America Foundation page on the initiative (not pointed to in any of the above).

Its relationship to the State Department's "information warfare" initiatives isn't clear.

WiFi Lunchbox Guy said...

As for the American internet kill switch, it fell off the radar in late February. The White House issued a press release in May, not that the MSM cared. Links (of questionalble quality) here and here.

The Phantom said...

I'm going on the assumption they'll do whatever the hell they want, for as long as they want, unless the rest of us get tired of it and just fire 'em.

Next step is wireless cloud. No towers, everybody's phone becomes a router and storage for... Everything.

One would consider it science fiction except Jobs just announced an early version last week. iCloud. Won't that be fun? Try and shut that shit down, Big Brother.