I’ve recently discovered meshtastic and related tech. With the trust vacuum around cell phones and data scraping and tracking etc, I basically assume the government et al can see what’s up on my iphone constantly.
For interpersonal communication regarding civil disobedience, protest, resistance etc-- do LoRa devices offer an actual solution? or am I very mistaken?
I’m posting from a laptop that I converted to Linux (not tech savvy so that was a project) from behind a VPN- genuinely looking to hear from smarter people than me regarding privacy and secure communication
Lots of good comments here. Just wanted to say: Privacy often depends on the threat scenario. What really helps is encryption.
And if you need anonymity within the network, that needs to be baked into the protocol. Like I2P or TOR do on the internet. They bounce traffic through random nodes so nobody knows both sender and receiver at the same time. That of course makes it expensive for the network, and slow.
Other protocols just send packets from a sender to a receiver. That’s fast. But people en-route know who’s communicating with each other. Packets might be encrypted, though. So third parties can’t look inside what kind of information is exchanged.
And there’s a million different threat scenarios with the surveillance state. They might be far away and not catch the radio you’re sending through the air. They might come and triangulate your position once you transmit any stuff over radio.
And the internet is just complicated. Most traffic there is encrypted these days. But the easy stuff they’ll do is just ask Google what’s on your account. Or have a side-channel to the data that’s generated for the advertising industry. Or bug your phone or unlock it. Or subpoena the internet service provider, or mobile phone provider. So they can see what DNS queries you do. Or your phone location 24/7. Or they’ll get access to your modern car electronics…
So depending on what you’re trying to do, you might want to get rid of your smartphone, modern car etc. Credit card, NFC train ticket… Accounts with big corporations… That’s all data the surveillance state is more interested in than random chat messages… Though, those have an impact as well. So it really depends on what we’re trying to protect here, because there’s so many different attacks on privacy from all kinds of directions. It is a chore.