In the heat of the moment, when protests are organized and coordinated over the internet, internet censorship can be very effective, and countries have become adept at controlling it.
John Gilmour's quip about the internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around is far from true for mainstream internet users, if it ever was.
Remember, cable is actually way more physically resistant to adversary interference in comparison to radio, satellite, or microwave towers.
You need to destroy cables, and equipment physically, unlike anything of above, and you can repair it quickly using omnipresent, off the shelf hardware. In other words, you can expend a great amount of resources sending goons to wreck thousands of DCs, and exchanges to little effect.
Physically denying regime's access to network exchanges will work.
Same with cell networks. Easy to jam locally, but even a big city is practically impossible without massive expense to physically take down cell towers. Idlib in Syria is a good example how a cutoff segment of cell network managed to stay online for a remarkable amount of time under military aggression.
I’m not sure this works with Russia. The police there don’t mess around, are very violent and have been practicing their tactics for at least a century.
> The police there don’t mess around, are very violent
Of course! That's rather obvious. You will not be able to resist any much bigger force than just police with puny handguns you can buy on the black market, but that's the point!
Have that militarised special police busy! Have them expending resources, have them running armour around cities at a great material cost. Not to say disruption of everyday life, and seeing armour on the streets will contribute greatly to galvanising the population, and demoralising the ordinary police.
Simple math tells that 1 million men strong police force will quickly exhaust itself being either split on 100+ major cities, or being constantly relocated from one city, to another.
The ratio of military age men, to police force in Russia is 21 to 1, and you very much expect that a bigger portion of population has to be counted, and not all mancount of police, and 3 letter services account for military like units.
Not to mention that Jan 6th and the current situation in Russia have approximately 0 things in common.
It's peer2peer in the truest sense, it can connect to other peers via Bluetooth or WiFi. It also uses Tor when it goes over the internet.
The fact the info spreads like corona when in person, means it takes a while for the info to spread, but once it explodes it goes big, and is hard to stop.
My favorite anti-censorship app.
If you define it in the same way that it was when that quote was originally stated, then protestors can still just as easily interconnect networks as they could back then. It might even be easier than back then if you consider using mesh wireless technology.
Smartphones aren't the internet. They're regulated endpoints within a restricted network which is itself connected to the internet. Just because these extremely limited little devices we carry in our pockets had their access cut off, and just because a lot of home users can't just open a browser and start browsing without talking to their neighbors, doesn't mean the internet can't successfully route around it. It just takes time and effort.
I still believe the quote to be true.
Terrestrial wired and wireless telecom is out; government can order them to turn off.
Broadcast RF is hard, because jamming and locating the source are relatively simple. And taking actions to stop jammers is probably more illegal than the protest.
Line of sight optical signaling is probably easy to locate the source of, but could work; otoh, easy to disrupt with smoke, etc.
If you can do something with peer to peer radio, that could work, but wifi or bluetooth frequencies are jammable.
Did protests not exist and revolutions not occur before the Internet? If anything, the Internet appears to have tilted the table in favour of rulers.
... although the pro-censorship crowd have an exploit for that as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3svMxAIas