The smartphone's rise in overseas markets is a "key development" that the State Department is watching over the next year, an adviser said Tuesday, signaling the agency's interest in using mobile technology to advance foreign policy goals.

The deployment of 3G and 4G mobile networks will enable more people to connect to the Internet at the same time and "up the stakes politically," said Ben Scott, Policy Advisor for Innovation at the Office of the Secretary of State. Mobile broadband penetration in the Middle East and Africa has lagged behind basic cellphone use. How international networks grow over the next 12 to 18 months will be monitored closely, said Scott. With that expansion, "there is going to be a whole lot more money on the table for pushing policies for attracting investment," he said.

Scott spoke at a panel discussion on the flow of Internet information hosted by Media Access Project, a Washington-based public interest law firm. His statement is the latest indication of State's push to leverage mobile technology to influence the political message in unsettled regions.

Using smartphones, activists can access Twitter and transmit photographs to the Internet. "Anyone with a smartphone can become a citizen reporter," he said.

State is also looking to use mobile channels to spread messages to stabilize regions. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, will fund programs that can "develop SMS messaging and other cell phone initiatives" for "countering extremist voices," it indicated in a grant document in November 2011.

It was reported last year that the State Department and Pentagon had spent at least $50 million on building an independent cellphone network inside Afghanistan. The network, created with towers on military bases, was set up to keep the Internet up even if official services were disabled.

State also has quietly supported the development of a phone app in which protesters can trigger a "panic button" that will delete all their contacts and transmit alerts to activists.

In just over the last three years, State would have spent about $70 million to promote free access to the Internet.

"The Internet is politically agnostic. It allows people to realize their desires whatever they may be," said Scott, "To me, that's the bedrock of Internet freedom -- and why it poses both vulnerabilities and opportunities for every government in the world, including ours."

Even as it has condemned the publication of classified diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks as a threat to human rights, the State Department has selected a documentary about the man behind the Pentagon Papers leak as part of a film series that will tour the world promoting "civil rights."

The film, entitled "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers," is about the man who leaked 7,000 pages of top-secret documents about the Vietnam War to the New York Times.

Funded by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and curated by the University Film and Video Association, the program will bring this film to more than a dozen countries, including Uzbekistan and Greece.

Daniel Ellsberg said that he hoped that "this film that the State Department is sending around the world to show a triumph of American democracy" would convey the message that "one can aspire to have a democratic system in which you don't have to get killed by the hundreds to kill a criminal regime." He spoke at a panel organized by the Silicon Valley forum, the Churchill Club, on Jan. 19.

"My new normal is to protect people who are unwittingly, unknowingly, often the subject of reprisals because of their mention in those cables," Michael H. Posner, assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, said at a Jan. 13 briefing on the state of civil liberties, NextGov's Aliya Sternstein reported.

Boeing, General Dynamics and the Navy fought over billion-dollar claims involving a failed 1991 stealth fighter aircraft contract on Jan. 18. The contractors claimed that the government withheld information from them, and by invoking the state secrets privilege, prevented them from delivering a satisfactory product. The question is, does throwing around the word "state secrets" unnecessarily politicize a dispute that can be resolved by contract law?

The facts of the case: In 1991, the Defense Department pulled the plug on the inauspicious project to build a stealth fighter, the A-12 Avenger, when it ended up too heavy for aircraft carriers to handle. The plane never took off from blueprint into production. The 20-year-long dispute is a bitter blame game following a disastrous $4.8 billion deal that in truth, just amounted to expensive aircraft blueprints.

The government demanded a refund of $1.35 billion after it cancelled the contract and declared General Dynamics and Boeing in default. The contractors sued, countering that they were owed an additional $1.25 billion for work done that had not yet been billed.

Boeing and General Dynamics said it wasn't their fault that they hadn't delivered what the Navy wanted; the real problem was the abuse of the state secrets privilege. The government withheld sensitive information that would have allowed them to deliver satisfactory results, the contractors claimed. The government countered that this was done to protect national security.

The information that came was "too little and too late to effectively allow the contract to proceed as planned," said attorney Carter Phillips. "The weight specifics that we were being asked to provide or to supply were literally impossible to comply with based on what the government already knew," he said.

His argument sounded almost convincing until he dropped this:

The problem is we don't know precisely what information we didn't have and were never entitled to. So it's very difficult to say how strong is our defense under these circumstances.

That admission reveals that this case is going to be a difficult one to argue. The politically-charged rhetoric around "state secrets" masks what is at the heart of the debate: "All we're asking for is the actual amount of money that we expended," said Phillips, "maybe to some extent you could say we're sort of being a little greedy." But a contract is a contract, he added.

Framing the case as a constitutional precedent centered around "state secrets" unnecessarily politicizes more fundamental problems, namely mutual distrust and insufficient planning.

The insistence of General Dynamics and Boeing that the government provide more specifications could hint at a lack of enterprise, Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to suggest. "Sophisticated contractors are perfectly capable of negotiating their own contract," he said. If the government fed too much information to contractors, "we are not just throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of government contracting; we're throwing the whole monkey."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia seemed in favor of tossing the case out of the court, arguing that the dispute could be better resolved by contract law rather than constitutional law. If it is indeed settled behind closed doors, we'll never know who put the monkey wrench in the gears of this contract. But really, in a case involving two the top five government contractors, billions of dollars, and the U.S. Navy, are we surprised?

The Transportation Security Administration came under fire from Internet users on Nov. 17 for being too slow to moderate and post readers' comments onto its blog, a sign the site is being read closely.

An impatient reader, noticing that comments weren't coming through, posted to Reddit on Tuesday, "The TSA is censoring all comments on their blog. Do you think we hurt their feelings?"

Forbes' Andy Greenberg rode on readers' anger on Wednesday morning:

The fact that the TSA blog has seemingly blocked all comments on its best venue for defusing immense public anger over these new security measures seems especially disingenuous given that it's long had a "Delete-O-Meter" on the bottom right of the blog site. As a transparency measure, that plug-in is meant to offer a count of comments deleted by the site's administrator. It hasn't moved in the last twelve hours-it seems Blogger Bob is simply not approving new comments, rather than flat-out deleting anything.

That nudge just might have prodded the site's Blogger Bob into action. A flood of comments -- mostly rabid rants -- went up late Wednesday afternoon.

The site has become a vibrant roasting platform for the agency, which has come under scrutiny for its security screening procedures and full-body scanners. The traffic and chatter climaxed with the surge of media interest around the TSA oversight hearing on Wednesday.

A post that went up as a forum for readers to "comment on things that are way off topic with the current post" amassed more than 605 responses in a day. Blogger Bob's patient explanation of why "opting-out of advanced imaging technology and the pat-down doesn't fly" prompted more than 350 comments in two days.

Not content with just the official blog, readers have found other creative ways to satisfy their anger. Rogue TSA Twitter accounts have mushroomed online, including "Agent Smith" of the handle @TSAgov, who tweeted today,

Need to know what SAEDA stands for? Enter "McGruff the Crime Dog-style cartoon sergeant to talk to your soldiers like Third Graders about information security," Gawker writes. (By the way, SAEDA is "Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the Army," shame on you.)

This guy in camo will dish out quizzes, make you memorize acronyms, terrorize and knock you down with a tank if you think you can fudge your way through his session. Watch a video of the interactive training here, or, better still, if you are in the mood to be traumatized, take it yourself.

77,000 documents on the Afghan conflict were posted on Oct. 22 onto the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. The Pentagon wasn't pleased.

"We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies," Geoff Morrell, the Defense Department press secretary, said in a statement to the New York Times.

With camo cartoon commando breathing down your neck, there might be good reason to be afraid, be very afraid.