(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The plan includes secretive projects to create independent cell phone networks inside foreign countries 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.
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 that is sweeping the globe."
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable US policy supporters to communicate in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
United States officials say that the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cell phone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country.
The new project has found a champion in Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, "there is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports," Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic.
"We're going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to survey," Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the "Internet in a suitcase" project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation told the NYT.
The group's suitcase project will rely on a version of "mesh network" technology, which can transform devices like cell phones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices - each one acting as a mini cell "tower" and phone - and bypass the official network.
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 like Ethernet cables.
"The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it," said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cyber security expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project.
One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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