Comment by kkfx

My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.

We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.

So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.

If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.

We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.