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.