The US has admitted its part in providing all kinds of support to protesters in countries with totalitarian governments. The US Department of State has been funding special programs used to encode correspondence between opposition members, remove all secret data from a cell phone or send warning messages to all protesters. Evidently, these programs are quite costly.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the US was supporting opposition activists in countries that Washington sees as non-democratic. The current Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the United States, Michael Posner, said that particular companies are involved in producing applications for cell phones which help protesters encode text message and e-mails and access blocked web sites. An IT expert Vadim Basin says that creating such programs is rather a time-consuming and costly business:
“Each cell phone model has its unique operating system, and it should be compatible with Apple, Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia`s Symbian.”
The US is promoting a ‘panic’ button application that a pro-democracy activist can press to automatically delete the phone’s entire address book and simultaneously transmit a warning to other activists. It is unclear how many insurgents in North Africa and the Middle East have used this program in recent months. However, journalists found out that …
