U.S. Hopes "Internet in a Suitcase" Will Offset Internet Censorship | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Hopes "Internet in a Suitcase" Will Offset Internet Censorship

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37 pointscurthopkins18 comments

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I sure hope you can buy these that work inside the US :-)

It's funny to see the US government pretend to care about Internet censorship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

"Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory"

They also operate proxies for China.

They clearly care.

I'd say parts of the US government care, but not all of it.

Yeah, like ICE.

Unfortunately the "freedom" of the US has been corrupted by corporate interest, and thus whilst this is in some ways admirable, there is absolutely no way a sane person could trust the US government again.

That's great as long as you're interested in your internet access being provided by US intelligence.

I wonder what they'd do if the dissidents they were trying to help used it for copyright infringement as well as all their normal communications?

I'm hoping we can get this in countries with draconian censorship - such as where they confiscate websites outside of the courts or due processes. Much like the US. boom. Irony strikes back.

It's hard to lend this effort any credibility after telecom immunity, and the PATRIOT act renewal this year.

It's really really cool to see this :). I'm sure everybody here remembers, but back in 2009, lost of geeks were clamoring for ways to try and provide internet to Iranian protestors. Something exactly like this is what we were always daydreaming about on IRC, and wondering why the CIA hadn't already built.

In the modern world, "bombing" a country with these things could be a very very liberating thing for the recipients.

If the US distributed these in Iran, the government there would probably consider anyone using them a US agent and arrest them.

How would they know?

The point is to drop enough of them (mount them to cheap drone aircraft if you want to, like hobby-grade stuff) that it covers the city in wifi.

It's not literally a suitcase, and it's not something that you take back to your house and plug in to. It's something that is transmitting from a few blocks away.

if governments can detect even the passive reception of signals (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/...), I don't think it would be too difficult to pick up who is talking to these devices. Or, even if they can't, fear of detection would probably keep a large chunk of the populace compliant.

Which isn't to say that such devices wouldn't be useful. Just that they'd be far more effective in situations like Egypt or Libya than in ones like Iran or China. I think they'd be even more useful in the hands of someone like the Red Cross.

I am not a physicist, but that's detecting reception of (I think FM) UHF and requires specialised equipment. Detecting Wifi which uses a spread-spectrum modulation at a higher frequency would be even more difficult. Add to that the existing, allowed Wifi networks that probably already exist which overlap the banned ones.

The real problem in security is usually human factors — loose talk, spies, informers, interrogation — not technological ones.

But the thing is that using a wifi node is not passive reception. And while wifi uses spread spectrum, in order to be accessible to the people you want to reach, you'd need to make it available using common protocols. The authorities need only go war driving for these nodes, connect and then watch the tcpdump output. Corporations do this now to detect rogue access points, so I don't think it's beyond the means of a sufficiently motivated government.

'TV detector' vans are basically myths used to enforce licence paying. They've now moved to a 'the database knows!!!' way of scaring people and don't talk about TV detector vans any more.

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