U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

NYT ^ | 6/12/11 | JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF

[Nachum]

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

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.”

[JimRed]

Direction finding gear does not necessarily have to produce a signal.

[JimRed]

I must have erased the following question: isn’t RDF gear passive listening?

[DarkWaters]

And more to the point, out of the sight of the American People or archiving laws that would risk disclosure.

[af_vet_rr]

Speaking of the NSA..