There was a fascinating story in yesterday’s New York Times on the development of “shadow” internet and mobile phone systems that would allow dissidents to operate when their governments censor or cut off communication lines.

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.”

See the New York Times article for more.