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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

It bears mentioning that services like Radio Free Asia have been broadcasting into China via shortwave and have been an uncensored source of news for decades. Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to jam these broadcasts, I'm not sure how successful those efforts are in 2018. I suspect more funding for these organizations can only help however.

(Bonus fact: Radio Free Asia contributed most of the initial funding for the development of the Signal protocol!)

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> Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio.

My sense is that analog methods are the best response to authoritarian regimes; and the best way to prepare for the advent of one is to familiarize yourself with analog spy trade-craft (and analog response to digital spying, like disguise).

Speaking of which, does anyone have any non-fiction book recommendations about analog spycraft and responses to authoritarianism? Things like how to do dead drops, samizdat, clandestine distribution of literature and the like?

I'd like to hear more about this, too. I would probably start looking for non-fiction about the Soviet Union and East Germany. My intuition is that the human factor is more important than the spycraft. In other words, how do you know who agrees with you politically? How do you know if you can trust them? They could be an informant for the police.

There's a scene from The Man In The High Castle season 1 where some of the Japanese are trying to figure out if the antique salesman shares their political beliefs. To give an opening, they ask questions sort of in the subject area, but plausibly deniable. He fails the test, but even if he passes, he can't just come straight out. It would be based on subtleties of words, facial expressions, attitude, maybe a joke in response. Even then, he's better off if there's not a Nest or an Alexa recording the whole thing.

Related, I heard about a man who was handing out political brochures on a street in the Soviet Union. Before too long, the police came and took him into custody. To their surprise, the brochures were blank inside. When they asked the man what was going on, he said, "everyone already knows!". But they can't talk about it.

Uncensored but not unbiased. Until 2013, Radio Free Asia and other Voice of America related broadcasts were banned in the US since it was considered propaganda.

> Uncensored but not unbiased. Until 2013, Radio Free Asia and other Voice of America related broadcasts were banned in the US since it was considered propaganda.

That's just wrong. For one, VOA/RFA/etc. aren't "banned" and it's hard to believe how they could be without active jamming. They're were just forbidden to direct their broadcasts at American audiences. The concern was that the government should not be in the business of competing with existing American media organizations. If there was any concern about the content of the broadcasts, it appears to have stemmed from the idea that the State Department, which used to run it, had too many communists in it.

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