The US government is financing the deployment of shadow Internet and mobile phone systems in countries including Iran, Syria and Libya, which would allow members of the opposition in these countries to communicate outside of government control, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

According to the newspaper, the US-sponsored, secretive projects include the creation of independent cell phone networks inside foreign countries, as well as an "internet in a suitcase" program. Financed with a $2.0 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communications over a wide area with a link to the global Internet, the paper noted.

The effort has "picked up momentum" since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shut down the country's Internet in the last days of his rule, said the newspaper. The Syrian government recently followed Mubarak's example, temporarily cutting off much of the country's Internet.

By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures, the report noted.

Hillary Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause, declaring the move as "promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments".

But "the distinction is difficult to maintain", the paper quotes Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. "You can't say, 'All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes' — they're the same thing."

He also added that "the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them."