Russia Today
August 18, 2011
When a wave of revolution crashed over the Middle East this spring, many said what ended in the streets began with 140 characters or less — through social media like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Hoping to harness the people power of online communication, the US State Department is providing $2 million in grants for the “Internet in a suitcase” to help dissidents circumvent repressive regimes’ Internet censorship with mobile Web technology.
The suitcase is part of the $70 million the US State Department will spend on Internet circumvention technology in 2011.
“It’s part of what Secretary Clinton calls a venture capitalist approach to the wide range of challenges that democracy and human rights activists face in Internet repressive environments around the world,” said Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor during a July 13 event at the New America Foundation in Washington DC.
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The suitcase is designed to give dissidents a mobile web with mesh technology that can run through cell phones and other devices, and that doesn’t have to travel through centralized servers that are easily shut down by governments.
But John Young, founder of confidential document clearinghouse Cryptome, said that American suitcase servers will serve a “dual purpose.”
“The suitcase is meant to give the illusion that you can run these electrical devices without going through national systems — and that may be true, but they will not be outside the US system,” Young said. “The price that you get for being empowered is that the United States gets to watch what you’re doing and probably influence what you’re doing.”
According to the hacker collective Anonymous, it isn’t just governments that are doing the spying. Anonymous released 70,000 classified emails from defense contractor HB Gary Federal detailing the ROMAS COIN program, designed to manipulate social media through persona management, in which one person can pretend to be many different people online.
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