The government is countering the Assad regime in Syria and the mullahs in Iran with an entirely different weapon...transparency.

According to the Guardian newspaper, a year-long not-so-secret project has been underway in a nondescript building on D.C.'s L Street aimed at undermining the controls that countries like Syria and Iran impose on Internet activists. And the tools the staff uses are rooted just as much in the internet's need for openness as it is in activist-justified reasons for self-preservation.

Codenamed Commotion Wireless, the project aims to make code available to Internet activists, enabling them to create stealthy "mesh networks" so they can communicate with each other without fear of interception from state security services, access delay-tolerant Twitter apps that allow users to publish censored Tweets on the wider Internet for all to see, and even erase data on cell phones in case they are detained by security forces--or something much worse.

"Everything is completely open--all the code, everything," said Sascha Meinrath, who runs the project at the New America's Foundation's think tank in D.C., in an interview with the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman.

The unprecedented openness even extends to email correspondence with self-described activists and sympathizers in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, many of whom, staffers are confident, are actually cyber spies for various intelligence services in countries as far flung as North Korea, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

And weirdly enough, Meinrath is happy to oblige them.

"If it's a really good question, we'll put it on our frequently asked questions page," he said. "Hard questions help us get better."

The strategy isn't the brainchild of a pie-in-the-sky activist.  It's the culmination of years of successes and public failures that have caused the federal government, particularly the State Department, to rethink how it combats Internet censorship.

During the 2009 Green Revolution protests in Iran which rocked the regime there, a little known programmer, Austin Heap, wrote a code that would have allowed dissidents to circumvent the regime's "halal internet" that blocked access to sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media outlets. Codenamed Haystack (as in "needle in a"), Heap's code was endorsed by the State Department with fanfare. 

The Guardian later awarded him with a prize for innovation, edging out Twitter--the social network of choice for Internet activists in Iran at the time. But as the protests turned violent, and footage of murdered protesters was beamed throughout the globe, there was a backlash against Haystack and Heap in particular.  As it turned out, Iranian intelligence services were able to exploit a flaw in Heap's code, allowing them to detain--and possibly kill--many of the activists who accessed it.

Pro-democracy activists panned haystack and Heap received numerous death threats via Twitter and his phone.  He required 24/7 police protection thereafter.

More recently, as Syria's crackdown on Internet activists has intensified, activists in that country have unearthed a treasure trove of documents connecting private Western surveillance companies to the Assad regime.  When allegations surfaced that Blue Coat software was being used by Syrian security forces to access the IP addresses of Internet activists who were blogging in cafes and coffee houses across the country, Telecomix--the company who made the software--suddenly found itself at the heart of a months-long debate about the human rights, Internet freedom and America's commitment to democracy.

The U.S. State Department later waded into the issue, initiating an investigation into Telecomix's activities in Syria around the time the IP addresses were discovered.

With that history in mind, Commotion Wireless wants to do anything it can to avoid allegations that they are putting internet activists' lives at risk--even if it means letting a few bad apples inspect its very public computer codes.

"It's just good sense," Meinrath describes the project's open-door policy. "The history is when we [the government] have done those things--it's been very bad!"

Even so, officials in Iran have gone public about their hatred of Commotion.  When Commotion was profiled by The New York Times last year, Heidar Mosleshi, Iran's Intelligence Minister, went so far as to say openly that the state had devised ways to sabotage the project.

Instead of instilling fear though, Mosleshi had inadvertently done the opposite.

"We got flooded with hundreds of messages from people in Iran wanting to know how to download it," Meinrath said.  "He did more to spread word about our technology than anything we ever could have done."

Such is the way of the Internet.  Shut down a website here, and a mirror pops up somewhere else.  Crash a site with traffic, only to see it emerge as even more popular later.  The phenomenon even has a name, the Streisand Effect, which stems from attempts by actress-singer Barbara Streisand to suppress photographs of her home being put on the Internet and in so doing, made the photos even more heavily sought and viewed.

In the end, 'weaponizing' social media--as NYU Professor Clay Shirky puts it--may be a pipe dream as future threats to the Internet emerge--not just from rogue states, but also multi-national corporations, for whom an open Internet is as much a threat to their bottom line as it is to the stability of autocratic regimes like North Korea's.

"The real threat isn't from Iran saying we're going to disconnect and build an alternative Internet--that's a desperate act," Shirky said. "The real threat comes from the MPAA and our allies. We should be much more worried about what's going on in South Korea than North Korea."