Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest

[grarpamp]

> Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest
>
> Vice
>
> Imagine waking up and checking your phone after several evenings of mass
> demonstrations. You try scrolling through your Twitter feed, but it won’t
> load. You turn your router off and on to no avail. You try texting a friend
> to complain, but the message fails to send. Frustrated, you walk outside.
> People scattered along the sidewalk look as disoriented and confused as you
> feel—except for police officers and the National Guard, who are forcefully
> telling everyone to immediately return to their homes over a loudspeaker.

The actual direct links to the original article
and the Mycelium Mesh project...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7e9y3/activists-are-designing-mesh-networks-to-deploy-during-civil-unrest
https://mycelium-mesh.net/
https://www.nycmesh.net/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dygj7m/diy-internet-provider-sees-demand-spike-amid-coronavirus-pandemic
https://www.vice.com/en/article/935q93/activists-are-beaming-free-wi-fi-to-protesters-at-nycs-city-hall-occupation
https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nz798m/harris-imsi-catcher-picture-phone-tracking-device-in-the-wild
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-government-couldnt-shut-down-the-internet-right-think-again/2020/03/06/6074dc86-5fe5-11ea-b014-4fafa866bb81_story.html
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/shutting-down-cell-service-during-protests-constitutional-dimension
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/barts-cell-phone-shutdown-one-year-later


Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest

The Mycelium Mesh Project is testing DIY networks that can be quickly
deployed on trees or lamp posts during a political uprising.

A mesh networking device is affixed to a utility pole
Photo the Mycelium Mesh Project

Imagine waking up and checking your phone after several evenings of
mass demonstrations. You try scrolling through your Twitter feed, but
it won’t load. You turn your router off and on to no avail. You try
texting a friend to complain, but the message fails to send.
Frustrated, you walk outside. People scattered along the sidewalk look
as disoriented and confused as you feel—except for police officers and
the National Guard, who are forcefully telling everyone to immediately
return to their homes over a loudspeaker.

Currently, most of us would have no choice but to retreat into
isolation in such a situation. But organizers and programmers with the
Mycelium Mesh Project are hoping to provide a solution by designing a
decentralized, off-grid mesh network for text communications that
could be deployed quickly during government-induced blackouts or
natural disasters.

“The network that we all use will work pretty much fine in 99.9% of
the cases. But then when it doesn't, it's a real big problem,” Marlon
Kautz, an organizer and developer with the project, told Motherboard.
“The authorities' control over our communications infrastructure can
just completely determine what is politically possible in a situation
where the future is really up for grabs, where people are making a
move to change things in a serious and radical way.”

Mesh networks, a form of intranet distributed across various nodes
rather than a central internet provider, have the potential to
decrease our collective reliance on telecommunication conglomerates
like Spectrum and Verizon. Nonprofits, like NYC Mesh, are increasingly
offering relatively affordable internet alternatives by installing
mesh nodes at people’s homes, which then connect to “supernodes” and
the internet at large. One such network was set up at an encampment
outside city hall in New York City, during the height of last summer's
protests against police violence.

During a civil unrest situation, government operatives could
theoretically disconnect established commercial mesh networks by
raiding activists' homes and destroying their nodes or super nodes.
The Mycelium Mesh Project is addressing this potential weak link by
developing a system that could be deployed at a moment’s notice in
non-locations, such as on abandoned buildings, tree tops, electric
boxes and utility poles.
A volunteer affixes a mesh networking node to a light pole.

A volunteer affixes a mesh networking node to a light pole. Photo
courtesy of the Mycelium Mesh Project

Nodes would be cheap, run independently of the power grid, and could
be produced with materials that can be obtained locally. So far, the
collective has successfully sent and received text messages across
thirteen miles during field testing around Atlanta, Georgia with nodes
powered by rechargeable batteries harvested from disposable vapes.

The scenario they are prepping for is less far-fetched than it may
initially seem. In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART)
police shut down wireless service for three hours to disrupt protests
against the agency’s murder of Oscar Grant and Charles Hill. In 2016,
Water Protectors at Standing Rock claimed that their cell phone
signals frequently disappeared and had difficulties with livestreams
and uploading videos and other posts to social media. In February of
this year, Myanmar’s military dictatorship shut down
telecommunications and Wi-Fi across most of the country during its
coup d’état. Connections can also become unreliable due to less
nefarious reasons, such as when networks become congested during mass
events like protests and music festivals.

“This internet shutdown doesn't happen in a situation where everything
is going well,” a Burmese human rights activist in Myanmar told Wired
UK. “They are cracking down on the protests, killing civilians. You
live in fear that something can happen to you at night. And you think:
if there is no internet, you cannot talk to your friends or colleagues
about what is happening.” Since 2019, 45 countries have shut down the
internet 239 times, according to the internet research firm Top10VPN.

During the Black liberation uprisings in the U.S. last summer, the
government chose not to shut down communication networks. Instead it
seemed to strategically gather intel with stingrays and dirtboxes,
which collect data from cell phones en masse. But Kautz says a
shutdown could happen next time.
Volunteers program mesh network nodes, which can be deployed anywhere
to enable communication during an internet blackout

Volunteers program mesh network nodes, which can be deployed anywhere
to enable communication during an internet blackout

The Communications Act of 1934 allows the president to shut down or
take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” in
the US. And while civil liberties groups like the ACLU and EFF have
argued shutoffs violate the First Amendment, there is no legal
precedent stating they are strictly off-limits. “It is the backstop,
it is the joker, it is the ace card and there are more than enough
examples to demonstrate that the state will do this kind of thing if
they need it to maintain control,” Kautz said.

The Mycelium Mesh Project is still in its relatively early stages of
development. Messages aren’t encrypted—a necessary feature for
activists—and the model isn’t ready for long-range use. But developers
are hopeful that their open-source model will promote cooperation
amongst like-minded coders.

“This is anti-capitalist work, which is non-commercial. We are not
trying to start a business,” Kautz explained. “We're explicitly trying
to take advantage of open source type concepts. So not not only do we
want the code that we're developing to be open source, but our entire
production model will be.”