Is your foreign gov't shutting off your internet? The U.S. Military has the ability to turn it back on, at least temporarily

I AM NOT SAYING MUBARAK'S ADMINISTRATION IS AN OPPRESSIVE REGIME (I'm actually consciously not taking a public position on it). This post is solely for the tech portion of the content, nothing political.

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If your lack of internet isn't stemming from not paying your bill, or not restarting your humongous Linksys router, but instead your gov't shutting it off... it turns out the same Cyber tools that the U.S. Military can (in theory...) use to disrupt internet-based communications, cellular networks, satellite links etc can be used in reverse to turn it back on, albeit temporarily. This blurb from the article puts it best:


[John] Arquilla [a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School] doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.

“We have both satellite- and nonsatellite-based assets that can come in and provide access points to get people back online,” Arquilla says. “Some of it is done from ships. You could have a cyber version of pirate radio.”

The "problem" with doing this is technically it could be considered an act of war, in the same severity as actively disrupting communications of a foreign entity. Click here to see how they helped Haiti (who allowed them) -> http://www.haitian-truth.org/how-haiti-got-the-internet-back-with-help-from-a-guy-in-seattle/

Read the whole article from Wired at the link below.

Source-> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/secret-tools-force-net/

Here's to people dealing with the (hopefully temporary) loss of internet better than Randy Marsh...