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This is why good old analogue amateur or personal radio should still be a powerful force for people who are rebelling against their governments and corporate ov

• ajarmoniuk 15y ago
  but it's easy to triangulate the broadcaster and take measures (imprison, torture, kill). I lived through the communist era in Poland. Amateur radio stations were banned and prosecuted (you would go to jail), even possession of a CB radio was a crime. Things may be similar in Iran.
  • VMG 15y ago
    I'd imagine that in principle, any wireless communication with simple technology and therefore little infrastructure is still more robust than complex, wired technology with high infrastructure needs.
  • yread 15y ago
    I would guess that Internet without HTTPS and SSL is much more traceable than a radio. Also if the authorities don't know there is encrypted radio communication going on they would have hard time finding out about it
  • bwarp 15y ago
    It's not that easy and there are simple anti-triangulation countermeasures you can use. It's possible to drop decoy transmitters/relays, which are easy enough to knock up and are cheap. You can also use refraction to "bounce" HF radio waves off the ionosphere to mask the source. You can scramble the signals. You can disguise the signals as legitimate but include carrier data. There are lots of ways of hiding what you are doing. As usual, if you don't take precautions, that will happen. Pirate radio stations were and still are common in the UK, particularly around London. They move around regularly and broadcast for short periods so it's hard to trace or predict a location. The same conditions apply here.
    • Tichy 15y ago
      Do you have more resources on that? Occasionally I think about the problem of censorship and free speech and wonder how to enable occupied people to report their plight. So far I could not think of a solution, because I assumed any kind of broadcasting would make the broadcaster an easy target. So what you say interests me (to be fair I am not building anything at the moment, and I am not a hardware person - yet).
      • bwarp 15y ago
        Yes. You need to look up "Electronic Countermeasures". There are plenty of chunks of real info out there on it. Pretty much any form of it is plainly described despite the usual expectation that it's top secret or classified. There are handy forms of point to point encryption which can be easily used on paper and via voice as well. Nice read here on it: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/onetimepad.htm http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/onetimepad.htm Also, remember the general rule is that if the broadcaster can become a target, so can the oppressor. When I finished my EE qual, I actually ended up working as an engineer for one of the more nefarious defense contractors. After about 2 years, I realised that what I was working on was engineering devices to watch people, to keep secrets and kill people. So I gave them the finger. My morals have kept me thinking about this for the last 20 years.
        • Tichy 15y ago
          A onetime pad would be a good example of something I would not like to have on me if got grabbed by some oppressive regime. That is the kind of problem I mean. Tor is not a solution, because it could be found on your computer. Radiowaves - I don't know, I would also expect them to be easily detectable, but I'll look it up.
          • bwarp 15y ago
            A one time pad can be easily hidden amongst other text i.e. a book printing with some rules applied (third letter of every alternate sentence).
• drrotmos 15y ago
  Sure, but it's uncommon and traceable, which means that if it becomes widely used by dissidents, that would be an excellent way of tracking them.
• jwblackwell 15y ago
  The internet may be easy to disable but to kill it is another ball game
  • bwarp 15y ago
    Bits of it are easy to kill (at country level at least).