These are all really cool and can be very useful, but personally I think decentralization and meshnets are to some extent a "false god" from a political and act

These are all really cool and can be very useful, but personally I think decentralization and meshnets are to some extent a "false god" from a political and activism point of view. The fact is that any nation state can trivially attack the physical Internet. It can order any corporation operating under its jurisdiction to cooperate. It can force any operator to install filtering software or equipment. Come hell or high water, it can physically unplug things, force power companies to turn off power, etc. Given a political worst case scenario the wired Internet (and that includes things like 4G) will not and cannot be any safer from state tampering than any other infrastructure. Completely anarchistic decentralized meshnets that operate over things like peer to peer wireless have another problem. I am not aware of any existing totally decentralized meshnet protocol that isn't vulnerable to some form of attack against its trust system. There's the sybil attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack Then there's "long con" attacks where a group of malicious nodes joins the network and pretends to be friendly for a long period of time, adding a lot of resources and gaining a lot of trust, only to finally use that trust to fragment, DOS, snoop, or otherwise harm the network. Any of these attacks are well within the technical capability of a well-funded nation state. In addition, any wireless mesh can have its users located through frequency triangulation. A nation state wouldn't even have to arrest everyone. It could simply isolate the most important nodes, locate them, and confiscate the equipment or pressure, arrest, or pay off their operators. For a fee some trusted operators might be transformed into double agents. The reason I call it a "false god" is that I fear for some it can act as a substitute for real political activism. The fact is that in a political worst case scenario, nothing is safe. Thus the real battle to be fought is not in the technical sphere but in the human political sphere. We must preserve our liberties or they will be taken from us, period, and no amount of clever tech will truly stop that once the enemy is upon us.