[link|http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/2928332.htm|Cuba libre!]

Excerpt:

Etecsa this year began selling Internet access cards to
foreigners. Costing $15 cards for five hours of access, they are
often obtained by Cubans, who open free Webmail accounts
such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Resembling telephone cards, each
comes with a temporary logon and password hidden under
scratch-off paint.

To use the cards, all one needs is a modem-equipped computer,
which hundreds of Cubans have bought on the black market or
cobbled together with new and old components.

Garcia's PC, which runs a pirated version of Windows 98, was
fashioned from bought, begged and borrowed parts.

Cuban ``informaticos'' can also get full access to international
e-mail and the World Wide Web via pirated accounts.

Scores tell of paying $40 a month to buy clandestine access to
an already existing Internet account -- often held by an
unsuspecting foreign firm. Black market clients are advised to
use the account at night and on weekends when activity
probably won't be noticed.

The outright theft of dial-up account passwords also is
common, with hackers using special programs to copy Internet
passwords from other people's computers while they are
online.

I say:

Maybe there should be a shortwave Internet network based in Miami, to give these guys yet another option. Bounce around the band to avoid jamming like 802.11 does. Anon DH encryption to keep the snoops out. It likely won't be broadband, due to technical limitations, but it'll be mostly always-on. I'll gladly have my tax dollars go toward developing a PCMCIA adapter for this purpose. Mass produce and sell the adapter on the consumer market to anyone who wants one, and then let them find their own way to the oppressed peoples of the world. Also, maybe adapt HTTP to make use of broadcast UDP, non-encrypted, for all cookieless downloads from the US. With caching on the client side, this'll help conserve bandwidth. (Now that's a broadcast datagram!)

Oh, and let's have another base station or two in the far east to cover Red China and Vietnam.