State Department Funds Global Internet Revolution
I believe that history will eventually record this little-noticed policy decision as the game-changer in America’s half-century standoff with North Korea. No one can predict when we’ll see the result, but for all their imperfections of vision and execution, the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Clinton in particular deserve tremendous credit for this.
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.
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.
The American 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. [NYT]
Needless to say, this will have vast implications around the world. The effects may well catalyze significant political change in China before they reach North Korea, but when they do reach North Korea, they’ll hit like a shock wave for the very reason that North Korea’s extraordinary isolation has created such a powerful pent-up demand to speak freely, to trade freely, to love freely. Clandestine journalism has already had a tremendous impact our understanding of North Korea is the last two years. It may soon have an even more revolutionary impact on North Koreans’ understanding of us.
[T]he 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. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones 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.
Here, I want to credit a reader and friend I won’t name, but who read this small post and began to proselytize the idea it raised at multiple layers within the U.S. and South Korean governments. No doubt, he wasn’t the only one talking about the potential impact of so many ideas like this that are only now congealing in the minds of right-brain policy-makers who are usually at least a generation behind this new, left-brain technological revolution. It is to the immense credit of those policy-makers that, despite those limitations, they’re capable of seizing on ideas like recycling old cell phones, increasingly inexpensive satellite phones, portable DIY base stations, and mesh networking, which is particularly interesting for its potential for North Korea:
The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones 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.
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 to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.
Until now, all that these ideas lacked was a modest amount of seed money for testing and evaluation, and enough political will for governments to pursue them. Markets — both commercial and political — will assuredly be much faster to seize on these concepts once they’re proven and ready for use. And once North Koreans can speak, trade, and organize without fear of detection or interference by the regime, the regime is doomed.
“… the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Clinton in particular deserve tremendous credit for this,” says Joshua. I agree, and I hope all American readers of this blog will remember that in November 2012.
The technology is a two-sided coin, a double-edged sword. One should be careful of loosing such innovations, and be prepared for consequences, some of which could easily boomerang…
Darn, dirty, underhanded neo-con regime changers!
Tell me what we and our society have to fear from the idea that people would be able to communicate freely, without government interference, even free of taxation.
I recognize that more events like Libya and Syria will be disruptive to the global economy, and that for a while, there will be unintended consequences. All of this will be even more true when the Chinese system really starts coming apart.
But in the long term, governments that reflect the will of their people are seldom any threat to us, and this technology makes it much harder for governments to endure in defiance of the people’s will. The popularity of unaccountable regimes has a short shelf life. Radical regimes seldom build direct elections into their systems of government. After their popularity wanes, they endure through oppression.
At the moment, plenty of us worry that the Muslim Brotherhood could end up in charge of Syria, or even Egypt. Worse, Al Qaeda could end up in charge in Yemen. Of course, this is a worst-case scenario. Such regimes have the potential to cause great harm while they last, but they can’t last much longer than the breach of their promises to their supporters, particularly if the disgruntled majority can’t be denied the means to shoot and communicate back. Just as it took the presence of Al Qaeda to convince Iraqis to support The Awakening and drive the terrorists out, people may have to experience a slice of life under radical Muslim rule to start tweeting and fighting for something better.
“…Just as it took the presence of Al Qaeda to convince Iraqis to support The Awakening and drive the terrorists out, people may have to experience a slice of life under radical Muslim rule to start tweeting and fighting for something better..”
I’ve seen this idea pop up in an increasing number of places. As if radical Islam is like the Chicken Pox, something you just have to go through on the way to adulthood.
The Iranians seem to be having some difficulty shaking off their case of this particular pox…
How to defeat the Great Firewall of China?
I don’t know how the Great Firewall works — but I do not believe it blocks undesirable content “at source” since that is nearly impossible. I think it acts as a filter, so that every Chinese-origin request goes through the Central Government’s server via China Telecom — and certain phrases and words are blocked there so that the request never goes out onto the web.
SO there is great potential for WiFi hubs in South Korea and Taiwan to provide wireless signals that are independent of China Telecom — but there is probably, at this time, a problem of range that can only be solved by “pirate radio” or broadcasters that are too close to shore. Come a state of hostilities, that might be a risk worth taking.
A Denial of Service attack overwhelms the victim hub by sheer weight of numbers, where computers are programmed, often remotely, to direct a particular query at a particular time. I don’t know what would happen with a directed denial of service attack in this instance — would it allow signals to seep through, or would all Chinese internet fail? Again, this indicates that China is far more susceptible of internet warfare than the US which is protected by some degree of redundancy caused by open connectivity.
This could be combined with an announcement that the computer is not working properly because the government has created an unworkable system in its attempts to close China off from the knowledge of the rest of the world.
The point is less to disrupt the government than to frustrate all those people, such as I, who now rely on the web. So, while foreign governments may wish to save their counterattacks for when “hostilities” erupt, we normal people would be affected, disconcerted and angry with our government whenever such a DDOS attack should occur.
Every server and ISP has an address: every computer has an ID. The first ID and address identifies the originator of a forbidden request. It is inconceivable that a totalitarian government would not wish to know who is questioning authority, so that the ISP and address are collected — and presumably analysed in some way.
But what about a botnet program that subtly alters the address that is stored at China Telecom?
You shouldn’t change the actual address because messages would never go back and forth (except that would be another way to create total frustration in the innocent user) — but a corrupted recording system is no use to the government, and must be closed and un-corrupted. A program that, once loaded onto one computer, spreads to all others, is stored there and then reinserted sporadically on the main server — and then consistently corrupts addresses net-wide would be an ultimately wholly frustrating demonstration that closed access means closed minds and an unhappy populace
My purpose here is not to destroy Chinese communications, but to show that government that the problems of controlled access are so clumsy and undesirable that open access is preferable to the popular dissent that comes with the bottleneck that is needed to make closed access work.
None of this is significantly different in concept from (our, Israel’s) Stuxnet activity, except that it is significantly less sophisticated than Stuxnet.
Beware totalitarian wolves in sheep’s clothing, the kind who would allow one vote for one person, one time. Time will tell if the ‘Arab Spring’ aided by Info tech yields anything positive…
Hiding behind a Chinese People’s Daily article, KCNA on 19 June responds to the very notion of the above post: http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news21/20110621-18ee.html
Incidentally, did you know that when you sign up for a Weibo account in China (the heavily-subscribed mainland equivalent of Twitter), you automatically get six or seven “followers” in the form of the Public Security Bureaus in your region? I guess Internet really _is_ all about making friends.