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
Thats an interesting question. I’m using Reticulum instead of Meshtastic, because it seems to allow more interfaces and better encryption.
As long as LoRa isn’t forbidden and the police doesn’t drive around and try to follow the LoRa signals, it seems to be a good choice. Jamming should also be considered, because that’s what a paranoid government could do too…
But so far, the bottleneck is the small amount of people who use it. At least with Reticulum. No idea how far Meshtastic has already come.
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.
For better bandwidth Ive been looking at 802.11ah (Long range wireless) but i haven’t seen any darknet implentations yet like what you are talking about.
I have been dipping my toes into meshtastic for the past few months, now having a T-Deck as a home repeater and a small node I carry in my pocket.
Channels can be E2EE if you set it up, but public channels are usually not.
In terms of being trackable, I would venture to say it does not protect you from being tracked. Most devices use a GPS signal to report location (though you can run them without this iirc). Most devices also require a phone in order for you to configure, and read/send messages.
Your best option would be a T-Deck without a GPS module, though as someone has stated in this thread there is a vulnerability allowing tracking of the MAC.
Hey everyone thank you for the really great and informative comments and links. I’m still new to meshnets and such, and have only recently taken a more active interest in privacy protection, so I very much appreciate the input
They can be as long as everyone has good security practices
Meshtastic might start to be useful in a use case like
- the Internet is demolished in an area
- power is not out, or at least everybody has enough batteries to last for a while
- a large actor is not driving around looking for LoRa device broadcasters (this one basically rules out avoiding surveillance)
- All you need is SMS tier texting
It’s also got so many limitations, I really don’t know what an optimal use case would be.
- Devices can’t be too far apart or the connection won’t work.
- Devices can’t be too close together or the network will get overcongested*
- Devices can’t be too many hops away, or the message won’t make it.
- Data transfer speeds range between slow and extremely slow
- You need either a specialized piece of hardware - which currently isn’t very good - or a separate phone to message people.
* I don’t know what a network that’s too congested looks like, but if a surveillance state feels like cracking down on communications to the point of shutting down the internet, they could probably rove around finding people with these stations.
i think i was overestimating the capabilities of the technology. what we need is a communication method that can be actually encrypted and totally anonymized for location and user identity
…they could probably rove around finding people with these stations.
True, though the benefit of these and other kinds of community-run decentralized networks is that it becomes harder to disrupt those networks. It’s not impossible, but they’re often built around an idea of, “But what if this node goes down?” so they have ways to address those issues or make it so that it’s easy to deploy new nodes.
Still, if things are to the point that the government is cracking down on hobbyist radios, you’ve probably got lots to consider regarding the best ways to communicate with other dissidents and activists.
It seems to me that a mesh network would only be useful if the internet went down and it was an accident. The one successful use case I’ve heard was during a natural disaster. If the internet is shut down intentionally, such as the case of the Iran protests, having a communication beacon sounds like a really bad idea…
Dangerous? Probably.
Bad? I mean, at some point, it becomes a risk assessment. Organizing at the risk of physical discovery might still be worth it, depending on your goals and what you’re willing to sacrifice. The benefit of these networks is that you don’t need tons of funds or construction ability to set them up. Whether you are an activist, a hobbyist, or a political dissident, you don’t need a government or business to do it for you.
It’s not really my place to determine what someone’s best strategy is, as strategic factors are likely always changing.
I’m no expert either. But I did download an app on my phone called Tesla Radar, and if you use it, you will discover the unique Bluetooth IDs of any Tesla car that drives past your phone while it’s passively scanning. I’m not smart enough with LoRa radios to know or understand if are similar issues with those…
There is always the option for gorilla node deployment. They need very little power, so solar etc is an option, and the hardware is relatively cheap.
A cheap drone could easily place nodes in hard to reach locations e.g. top of telephone poles. You now have an anonymous node that is trivial to connect to but harder to disable.
It’s far from perfect, but a good option.
I also now have the image of a node built into a drone. Then it bolting, like a startled sparrow, when they try to remove it…
A major remaining issue with Meshtastic is the NodeID being tied to the device MAC. This means that even if you can’t decrypt comms, it is trivial to track a device and thereby a user across geographical areas even with factory resets. This is solvable at a software level and iirc there’s a PR to address this vulnerability, but it has not been merged.
Not LoRa related, but you might be interested in graphene os on a pixel phone if you’re concerned about privacy
The data rates it can work at are very low compared to what most people are used to in terms of data transmission. It’s not really a general replacement for wireless data networks for most people.
https://www.rfwireless-world.com/terminology/lorawan-spreading-factor-range-data-rate
For the US:
For comparison, a plain old telephone system (POTS) analog modem might do 56 kilobits per second, more than double the highest data rate there.
It might be possible to create some sort of zero-maintenance public-access mesh wireless network that could start to approach something like an alternative for what people do with smartphones today, but if so, my guess is that it’s going to be done using hardware that uses something like self-aligning point-to-point laser links to tie together the nodes.
EDIT:
Those links, like.
LoRA networks as a general technology are only as private as they are designed to be. I have the option of both Meshtastic and Meshcore in my city, and as far as I’m aware, they both use E2EE.
Nodes and relays don’t store data for any period longer than it takes to relay a message, and even if they did, it would be encrypted. On top of that, they’re separate from other WAN/radio networks operated by capital interests, so they’re resistant (not impervious) to the influence of money and government.
As a solution for activism, I think they are a great choice, but they are limited by the fact that you need a device compatible with LoRA and the particular network standard you’re using, as would everyone else.
The surveilance state will continue to grow as long as it’s left to its own devices. Pushing against it is the most guaranteed way to avoid it taking over whatever aspects of your life.
I’d stop short of saying “solution” but they can be of some help. There are still surveillance methods that work against them, maybe not to decrypt the actual messages, but to monitor who is talking to who and maybe jam the communications. When you say “protest” etc., do you mean you’re part of some big mob in the streets and you want portable gizmos to communicate with other people who are also protesting? Or do you mean you’re all sitting at home coordinating something and the wired internet works?
Almost anything you do that’s scalable across lots of users and likely to be replicated, will also be targeted by surveillance. So the trick is to do something one-off that nobody else is doing and that isn’t figured into systematic monitoring. So that means concocting something unique or obscure, that only you and a few of your friends know about.
Generally maintaining security in something like this is difficult and paranoia-inducing and you end up feeling like you’re in Spy vs Spy cartoon if you remember those. The only real solution is to get rid of the surveillance regime.
yes to both of your questions
Well, my experience with Meshtastic is: Make the shittiest least finished chat app you can think of, and then give it a range most efficiently measured in inches.
Instead of using Meshtastic, just raise your voice a little, then you don’t have to spend money on shitty little Chinese-made circuit boards.
