US funds secret 'internet in a suitcase' for dissidents

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent mobile phone networks inside other 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 $US2 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.

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The US 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 such as Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, US officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $US50 million to create an independent mobile phone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban's ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country's internet, which had helped protesters mobilise.

The Obama administration's initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through the Voice of America and other means.

More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places such as China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication.

It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Sometimes, the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. US diplomats are meeting operatives who have been burying Chinese mobile phones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose department is spearheading the US effort.

"We see more and more people around the globe using the internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realise their aspirations," Clinton said in an email response to a query on the topic.

"There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change - change America supports," she said. "So we're focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world."

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border.

But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. "We're going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil," said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the "internet in a suitcase" project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan research group.

"The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people's fundamental human right to communicate," Meinrath added.

The invisible web

In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.

Then there was Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a masters degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.

The group's suitcase project will rely on a version of "mesh network" technology, which can transform devices such as mobiles or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralised hub. In other words, a voice, picture or email message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices - each one acting as a mini mobile "tower" and phone - and bypass the official network.

Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components lsuch as ethernet cables.

The project will also rely on the innovations of independent internet and telecommunications developers.

"The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it," said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement - by, say, using "pictograms" in the how-to manual.

In addition to the Obama administration's initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Continued…