THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION is leading a global effort to deploy
“shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to sidestep attempts to silence them.

An improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries is at work on the projects, which the United States State Department is spearheading.

Ranging in scale, cost and sophistication, some of the projects involve new technology; others rely on tools already created by hackers in the liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

One is an operation out of a spy novel: in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a rock band are assembling a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

The American 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 weeks, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet.

“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 nonpartisan research group.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause.

“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 ,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response.

“There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said.

The United States State Department has framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights , not as aimed at destabilizing governments.

But that distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media.

“You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ - they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

The United States, he said, could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

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

- The Invisible Web
In an anonymous office building 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. Mr. Meinrath, as the dean of the group at age 37, wore a tie. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the group’s suitcase project will rely on “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub.

Mr. 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 and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.

Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation- technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies - the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks - nearly useless, he said “No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”

That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth -which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets.

Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens.

By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention and related technologies, according to department figures.


- Shadow Cellphone System
Cellphone towers built by private companies have sprung up across Afghanistan. The United States has promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.

There is one problem. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban can shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.

But the Pentagon and State Department are collaborating on a project to build a “shadow” cellphone system that would be immune to the Taliban’s tactics by relying in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.

Cost estimates by U.S. military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million.


- Broad Subversive Effort
In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate about 190 kilometers from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.”

The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster which uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.

The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.

In a chat with the Times via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents , said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here.

The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who grew up in the United States, had never been to Libya before the uprising, but is now working in support of rebel authorities.

Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”




By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF