The Tech Behind Hong Kong Protesters’ Ingenious New Way To Duck Surveillance
Despite China’s best efforts to censor them, Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are finding ways to talk to one another and organize without Wi-Fi access or going through a central network. Instead they’ve been creating their own with a phone app that lets nearby devices communicate under the radar.
Droves of protesters have turned to an app called FireChat, run by Open Garden, which links smartphones to create mesh networks, or temporary Internet networks to circumvent outages and government monitoring.
More than 100,000 protesters have gathered since Sept. 26 in Hong Kong’s major through-ways in response to China blocking once promised democratic elections for Hong Kong’s top officials. Protesters used Instagram to broadcast and organize the demonstrations and the violent police response to peaceful protests, until China partially blocked the photo-sharing site Monday. China also tried to contain news reports by shutting down media outlets and television channels that attempted to show footage of the pro-democracy protests.
But FireChat bypasses China’s censorship firewall. FireChat works by letting users within 70 meters (230 feet) of each other send messages back and forth through the smartphones’ built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth hardware, creating a mesh network.
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http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/10/03/3575225/hong-kong-protesters-use-mesh-networks-to-skirt-censorship/
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