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Over the past few weeks, things have heated up again in Lebanon, with the U.S.-backed government on one side and the Syrian-backed Hezbollah on the other.

To many U.S. observers, this might be just another case of tensions flaring up in the Middle East. Do not be fooled. This is all about telecommunications policy--and the design of secure, attack-resistant data networks.

But first, a bit of background. Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for some time. In an effort to stop Hezbollah's guerrilla fighters from communicating, Israel has in the past jammed the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon. Eager to make sure that didn't happen again, Hezbollah has covertly built out a fiber-optic network throughout the areas it controls.

Jamming cell phones is relatively easy, as it is simply a matter of sending out radio waves. Disrupting a fiber-optic network, on the other hand, is extremely difficult. The Israelis would need to locate the individual fiber-optic lines, and then cut them. To do that, they'd need boots on the ground, in control. This is not something that Israel, or even the central Lebanese government, can currently do.

It seems that recently, the U.S.-backed central government of Lebanon tried to put an end to Hezbollah's private network. Hezbollah responded with force, eventually taking over West Beirut. As the Boston Globe recently reported:

(Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah) said the government's decision to shut down Hezbollah's fiber-optic communications network was tantamount to a declaration of war. For the (central) government, the network represented an intolerable example of Hezbollah's efforts to set up an Iranian- and Syrian-backed state within Lebanon. Hezbollah justifies the network, which carried its communications during a 2006 war with Israel, as a vital security asset.

This sort of thing, as interesting as it is, is way out of my league. To get a better grasp of the situation, I spoke with John Robb, an expert in modern asymmetrical warfare, an author, and blogger.

Robb said Hezbollah is not alone in building out its own communications infrastructure. He said that it is fairly common for such groups and that a similar situation exists in the Sadr City area of Baghdad.

Yahoo, Cisco Systems, and other U.S. companies have been heavily criticized for their assistance of China and its so-called Great Firewall. Thinking along these lines, I asked Robb which U.S. companies might be manufacturing Hezbollah's equipment.

He responded that there is no reason to suspect that U.S. equipment was being used. He added that Chinese-made, no-name optical-networking gear is available in most of these markets and certainly available to Hezbollah. Even equipment five to seven years old, Robb said, would work for Hezbollah's needs.

As a technologist, and someone interested in tech policy, this is fascinating. We typically hear that developing countries are leapfrogging over the traditional wire-based network infrastructure, due to the costs involved, and going straight to mobile or Wi-Fi technologies. It's interesting to see that fiber-optic networks can play a vital role in these countries. It seems that when there is a real threat of network interruption and jamming, the cost and difficulty of laying the cable is worth it.

At the Freedom To Connect conference a few weeks back, Doc Searls coined the term "glass roots" to describe community-built fiber networks. That term doesn't quite apply here, so I'm going to quickly stake my claim to "fiber warfare" (fiber vs. cyber, get it?). Remember, you heard it here first.

With that out of the way, I thought it'd be fun to end on a snarky note. For the last six months, I suffered with an AT&T 3Mbps DSL line. So how would Hezbollah act as an ISP? Consider these questions:

• What, exactly, does Hezbollah consider to be "reasonable network management," and are its views on this area the same as Comcast's?
• Does Hezbollah block BitTorrent? Does it use Linux?
• Does Hezbollah offer so-called "naked" DSL?
• If I do not get satisfactory customer service from the Hezbollah ISP, what happens if I resort to a Consumerist.com-style executive e-mail carpet bomb? Will its executives bomb me back?
• How does Hezbollah respond to Digital Millennium Copyright Act cease-and-desist threats? If the RIAA and MPAA are too scared to send DMCA threats to Harvard, will they risk sending them to Hezbollah?
• If I pay my fiber network bill late, will Hezbollah terminate my connection, or me?
• We do not have competition in most U.S. markets, but instead have a duopoly of crappy DSL and evil cable. How many Americans would switch to Hezbollah's fiber network if it meant that they could use BitTorrent without Comcast "temporarily delaying" their data transfers? Could Hezbollah force the Federal Communications Commission to open up the market to real competition?

Update:For more info on Hezbollah's network infrastructure, check out this detailed report.

PeopleJam is a place for people looking to give and receive advice on health, relationships, spirituality and finances to connect with each other.

(Credit: PeopleJam)

The site launched Monday and is in open beta right now. The founders have culled more than 150 "experts"--meaning writers, motivational speakers, counselors, finance experts and more--to blog on these lifestyle topics. There are also "lifecoaches" who also contribute content, both videos and text-based.

The idea is that PeopleJam will be the destination for people who have specific questions to create a profile, find answers to questions and add their own posts to the site, which encourages participation. The company calls it "social networking with purpose." It's aimed at Web users between 25 and 49, slightly older than the average Facebook/MySpace user.

It looks like Pearl Jam isn't the only band that has had its politically charged comments bleeped from concerts streamed from AT&T's Blue Room Web site.

AT&T issued a statement on Friday admitting that this kind of thing has happened before. And the company once again apologized.

"It's not our intent to edit political comments in Webcasts on attblueroom.com," the company said in a statement. "Unfortunately, it has happened in the past in a handful of cases. We have taken steps to ensure that it won't happen again."

Exactly how many performances have been edited is unknown. AT&T hasn't specified. Nor has it said what exactly it's doing to ensure that this won't happen again.

A firestorm of protest ignited last week when it became public that AT&T had deleted portions of the Pearl Jam performance at the Lollapalooza concert that included anti-Bush lyrics in a song. AT&T quickly apologized for the incident and blamed the company that handles the Webcasting for performances on Blue Room.

But then Wired.com reported Friday that it had received an e-mail stating that Webcasts from the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in June had also been edited. Specifically, comments made during the John Butler Trio show when a band member remarked on the government's lack of response during Hurricane Katrina were deleted, as were comments from the group Flaming Lips about George Bush screwing up.

MTV.com also reported Monday that Pearl Jam's publicist was notified that a fan watching the Bonnaroo concert also claims that comments made by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine had also been edited.

AT&T originally said that it only edits Blue Room Webcasts for profanity since the site is available to all age groups. But a group calling itself the Future of Music Coalition, counted 20 instances of curse words being used during the Pearl Jam Webcast that were not censored by the content monitor.

"It's clear AT&T has not made a mistake. They or the companies they've hired to monitor Webcasts have engaged in a clear and consistent pattern of silencing free speech," Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, said in a statement.

The Future of Music Coalition is a not-for-profit collaboration between members of the music, technology, public policy and intellectual property law communities. And the group took AT&T's latest admission of censoring other bands as an opportunity to point out the need for new Net Neutrality laws to prevent AT&T and other phone companies from having too much control over content.

"This censorship speaks to the heart of plans by AT&T and other big telecoms to set themselves up as gatekeepers of Internet content," Toomey continued. "If AT&T can't be trusted to Webcast the political stage banter of a few rock bands, why would we turn the keys to the Internet over to them? Their promises to not block Internet content now ring hollow."

I have to agree with the Future of Music Coalition. But to be honest, I am utterly shocked to discover that AT&T would be so stupid. It's one thing to ratchet back bandwidth to degrade service of a competitor. That could be tough to prove. But when you blatantly bleep political speech, people notice and they're going to get angry.

And to be honest, I can't see any business-related reason for doing such a thing. Could the Bush administration really be so sensitive about what a few rock bands are saying that they pressure AT&T to censor their performances? If that's the case, then I'm really worried. Because this country has bigger problems to deal with than Eddie Vedder or any other rock star slamming George W. Bush.

Apparently, saying disparaging things about President George Bush is enough to get you censored. At least that's what happened to the band Pearl Jam Sunday night during AT&T's Webcast of the Lollapalooza concert in Chicago.

According to fans who watched the concert on AT&T's Blue Room Web site, portions of the song "Daughter," in which singer Eddie Vedder altered lyrics to include anti-Bush sentiments, were bleeped out. The lyrics came during a segue into Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall."

The lyrics that were missing from the Web cast went like this:

"George Bush, leave this world alone; George Bush find yourself another home."

Pearl Jam was outraged. And the band railed against AT&T on its blog Wednesday for censoring the song.

"This, of course, troubles us as artists, but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media," the band said on its site. "AT&T's actions strike at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media."

AT&T issued a statement Thursday saying the whole incident was a big mistake. It had not intended to edit out any portion of the concert. Instead it blamed an overzealous Webcast partner who had supposedly been monitoring the Web cast to bleep out curse words.

"The editing of the Pearl Jam performance on Sunday night was a serious mistake made by a Webcast vendor and completely contrary to our policy," AT&T's statement said. "We have policies in place with respect to editing excessive profanity, but AT&T does not edit or censor performances. We have that policy in place because the Blue Room is not age-restricted."

AT&T said it is working with the vendor and the band to resolve the situation. And it plans to post the song in its entirety to ensure this doesn't happen again.

I understand people's sensitivity to vulgarity in this post-Janet Jackson-flashing-her-boob-world. But it really has to make you wonder how anyone monitoring a program specifically for offensive language or images would think that it was necessary to bleep political speech. Since when has the name "George Bush" risen to the ranks of a word that rhymes with "suck"? (I'm censoring myself here because I don't particularly like using that word anyway. But you get the picture.)

What's also strange is that other politically charged segments of the concert, including when Vedder brought a disabled Iraq War veteran onstage to call for an end to the conflict, were not edited.

So perhaps this was really a mistake. But the question remains, how did this happen? And how can it be prevented from happening again in an environment where all of our news, entertainment and information is being controlled by fewer media conglomerates.

Big phone companies argue that it's absurd to think they'd purposely block content, because users would simply go elsewhere. Pearl Jam even referenced in its blog one of my own CNET News.com articles from last year, where I quoted former AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre saying, "Any provider that blocks access to content is inviting customers to find another provider."

But Pearl Jam brought up a good point on their blog when they said that in a situation where only one provider is offering content, it's easy for content to simply be deleted or blocked. It's also easy for a provider to block traffic from a service they think threatens their business.

"What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band," the blog said.

Indeed, I agree with Pearl Jam. There's a slippery slope we're walking these days. How much control should network operators and big media companies have? In my opinion, it's time people start paying attention to all the big communication and media consolidation that is going on right now in this country. If we don't sit up and take notice now, there may come a time when it's too late.