Tech That Helped Turkish Protesters Save Taksim Square
forbes.com
forbes.com
That said, it is useful to develop technologies that make these systems more robust in the presence of a determined adversary. When I read the article on turning the Raspberry Pi into a micro-cell-site using the SDR kit from Attus I felt like here is a way you could spontaneously replace a cell network "on the fly" as it were. That stuff is still pretty expensive, a recent addon board for the Zedboard (which has an FPGA fabric already) is $3,000.
This is not quite false, but potentially misleading for those uninformed. They turned off repeaters they owned; the ground blocked the signals. There was no active interference.
Anyone can, of course, draw whatever conclusions they want given the facts, but (as I understand things) those are they, and hopefully we won't get off on "BUT JAMMING CELL PHONES IS ILLEGAL" tangents.
They certainly had the 'right' to shut down their own equipment. Their stated intent was to disrupt protests.
Egypt turned off the Internet during the Arab spring by turning off their own routers (which they owned and was their right) with the explicit goal of disrupting the protesters ability to organize and communicate.
The common theme here is the use of existing infrastructure in the organization and coordination of protests. In both Egypt and BART and Turkey's case the infrastructure had a designed non-protest-organizing modality. When the infrastructure gets shut down to cut off protesters it also impacts non-protesters in a potentially severe way.
The lesson here is that it is possible to create infrastructure on demand which does not require all of your participants to be self identifying by carrying some sort of specialized equipment. Had the protesters been using the 'family radio' frequencies, the ones that are so often abused at DisneyLand, searching and removing radios from people allow them to disrupt their organization. Whereas everyone has a phone, so it is impractical to confiscate all phones in order to prevent lawful demonstrations.
It broadcasts small packets to everyone in range. Those packets commonly include things like position reports, weather reports, and yes, short arbitrary messages. Receivers can, of course, filter on whatever they want. I can see the firehose of everything going on for miles around me, or just carry on an IM-like conversation with somebody. Repeaters can spread messages over a wider area, or even upload them to the internet[2].
Usually it runs on licensed 2-meter frequencies, or a variant on HF, and it only operates at 1200bps, but in principle it can be generalized to faster data rates, frequency hopping, etc.. Mass-produced equipment designed specifically for this sort of thing could be relatively cheap.
The trick is making everybody want one when they already have smartphones.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Syst...
[2] http://aprs.fi/
Future dictators should pay attention.
Calling these protests democratic is incorrect. Instead they point to a larger problem: that majorities of these countries support hard-line Islamist governments. The protesters are merely a reflection that fundamentalists (perhaps of any religion) are incompatible with a free and secular society.
tl;dr: Turkish elections are broken, AKP is unlikely to fix it since they greatly benefit from it.
I have no idea how Turkish protests are not democratic. There was a court law against the park demolitions, yet the government was ignoring it and having it their way. If you are not allowed to protest that, I believe you are against protesting against NSA surveillance as well? You could just wait for the next elections and vote for Republicans... that will show them.
Your claims are not backed by any sources (at least for Turkish protests, I don't have the necessary knowledge for Egypt to make claims). I am afraid you were misinformed and/or biased.
Bigoted governance predicated on smoke and mirrors is not democracy.
I think perhaps my comment was misunderstood. My point was more broadly that democracy and the region are not compatible. For the majority of the last century Turkey was always the exception (albeit a weak one as the military was responsible for keeping secularism alive) to this incompatibility. But seemingly, even in turkey, that illusion has fallen apart. No one is more sad about this than I am.
From day one the protests were not about democracy, but about civil engagement, something that doesn't really exist in Turkey. It is this lack of accountability, a fundamental part of democracy that makes Turkey's political system undemocratic.
Erdogan believes that "democracy is a bus, you hop on, go to the destination and get off". Democracy without engagement in a broken electoral system isn't democracy, it's a rigged game. That's the problem the Turks have, and that's why they're calling him a dictator (which in the view of some may be right or wrong).
"In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless but successful Ba'athist coup that resulted in Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming Iraq's president and Saddam his deputy. During al-Bakr’s presidency, Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician, albeit a decidedly ruthless one."
. . . .
"In 1979, when al-Bakr attempted to unite Iraq and Syria, in a move that would have left Saddam effectively powerless, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign, and on July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. Less than a week later, he called an assembly of the Ba'ath Party. During the meeting, a list of 68 names was read out loud, and each person on the list was promptly arrested and removed from the room. Of those 68, all were tried and found guilty of treason and 22 were sentenced to death. By early August 1979, hundreds of Saddam's political foes had been executed."
[1] - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2331951.stm