this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Privacy

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[–] Endovior@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago

The problem with mesh networking as a means of evading government censorship is that radio transmissions can be localized rather trivially. Meshtastic might have a use case for evading corporate censorship, or providing some kind of service in remote areas... but if a given government wants to ban unmonitored communications in general, then every node in the network is a beacon that local law enforcement can find and shut down. If your government is going into the sort of full repression that a Level 4 ban implies, then that sort of encrypted RF transmission amounts to a public signal that says "I'm breaking the law right now at this location", and anyone enforcing said ban can use that signal to physically track you down. (See also the related problem of finding a drone's operator, which is very doable.)

No, as a matter of both historical fact and current best practices, what's left after Level 4 is the sneakernet. If you want to share data that your government doesn't want shared, do it in person, ideally on miniature devices that are easier to smuggle. That's the only real data access that exists in North Korea, but it exists nonetheless.