Getting Past Censorship With Unorthodox Links To the Internet

An anonymous reader points out a short article at The Economist, which says "Savvy techies are finding ways to circumvent politically motivated shutdowns of the internet. Various groups around the world are using creative means like multi-directional mobile phone antennae and even microwave ovens to transmit internet traffic accross international borders."

Comments

Depends on the country...

[arcade]

This really depends on the country in question, but there are many way s to gain access to the Internet. If the country is connected to more free country by land, it should be possible to set up RONJA-devices for cross-border communication. (For more information about RONJA: http://ronja.twibright.com/ ). The devices might seem very conspicious but can be made to be less obvious. If using light outside the visible range, this might be a rather good alternative. Not easily blocked with radio-jamming neither.

One can further develop this with more links once inside the country - from location to location, without links that are easy to shut down without knowledge of their location available for the government.

Directional antennas for wireless devices is another alternative - but those are easier to jam with interference.

Now, it's a completely different ballpark if you don't have any friendly regimes close by. If you're an island nation (say cuba, australia, or others) - you might have to piggyback on existing communication links, and if the links themselves are completely severed - like they were in Egypt - it automatically gets more difficult. You'll need to piggyback on radio or satelite. I don't know the current state of packet radio, nor do I know how easy it is to trace or jam - but my suspicion is that it would be relatively easy to both track down and to jam.

Satelite, as pointed out in the article, is expensive. I do seem to remember some satelites having support for relaying messages for free for people using amateur radio - however - I suspect this is for voice communication and not for packet radio. It should, however, be possible to get tweets out if you can find someone to type them in outside of the country. Not easy to upload stuff to youtube using this, though.

Other ideas?

Re:Depends on the country...

[Anonymous Coward]

But avian carriers tweet really well.

Re:Depends on the country...

[drinkypoo]

Directional antennas for wireless devices is another alternative - but those are easier to jam with interference.

The problem with optical is range, which is piss-poor. As you say, the devices are somewhat obtrusive. A microwave antenna is often even moreso, but you can cover it with something opaque and hide it. An extremely directional microwave link is not necessarily trivial to jam and with fairly small antennae you can easily achieve ranges well more than double what you can practically do with a LASER. In addition these low-power microwave links represent less risk to the user :)

You'll need to piggyback on radio or satelite.

Or IOW, you depend on angels dropping you a satellite phone if you don't have one already.

Re:Depends on the country...

[Urza9814]

I do seem to remember some satelites having support for relaying messages for free for people using amateur radio - however - I suspect this is for voice communication and not for packet radio.

If you can send voice, you can send data. It may be slow, but it's certainly possible. You just need someone on the outside to set up the same system.

I don't know the current state of packet radio, nor do I know how easy it is to trace or jam - but my suspicion is that it would be relatively easy to both track down and to jam.

Somewhat, yes. I doubt that most governments would bother though. If they jam it, you can always jump to another frequency - there are quite a few amateur radio bands, and more than one that would allow digital transmission. If they block all the amateur bands, they've probably already blocked every other wireless link you could possible use (including satellites - quite a few of the arabic countries have already done that), so you're pretty thoroughly screwed without a land link in that case. Tracking it down is no different than tracking down any other radio source - which yes, is not all that difficult, but it does take a fair bit of time. And it's quite easy to mount one of these radios in your car and connect on the go with a laptop. They can't track you if you don't stand still. And I know people with relatively simple equipment (including parts of antennas made from pizza trays, for example) who have managed mobile contacts over distances hundreds of miles. If you make your antenna directional, it gets even better range, and much harder to track (but harder to use mobile as well)

Re:Waiting

[SuricouRaven]

Only if their number includes one of those capitalists to pay for it. Space is expensive, and is going to stay that way for a long time.

Multi-directional mobile phone antennae

[pushing-robot]

Any ideas where I can pick up a multi-directional antenna for my phone? The unidirectional antenna it came with is a huge pain.

Needs more work.

[SuricouRaven]

This is a start, but the tools are still firmly in geeks-only territory. Can't all us in the idealistic open-source community come up with new technologies? How about some program that lets mobile phones exchange data with people as they pass in the street, maintaining a shared high-latency store akin to Freenet? Or maybe some company would like to improve on the sat-internet antenna to make it even more strongly directional, thus making it harder to trace?

Re:Needs more work.

[SuricouRaven]

The solution is to find an X that is difficult to ban. Something that can be assembled from scrap with minimal training, like a cantenna. Or that is so useful and popular that to ban it would further feed the rebel's cause. Or even just something that is small and cheap enough to be easily smuggled or hidden, so that enforcing a ban would become very difficult. You might not be able to stop the secret police, but you can make their job very difficult.

Re:"microwave OVENS"? Nope, not a typo

[Dayofswords]

it's correct actually

an American naval-intelligence analyst at a NATO cyberwar unit in Tallinn, Estonia, describes a curious microwave oven. Though still able to cook food, its microwaves (essentially, short radiowaves) are modulated to encode information as though it were a normal radio transmitter.

Re:Laser

[DarwinSurvivor]

Exactly, fog, smoke, dust and "waving a stick in the air" are the only things capable of detecting a laser...

Re:biting my nails

[rgbatduke]

IIRC microwave ovens were "discovered" when soldiers learned that they could put things like hot dogs on sticks and dangle them in front of radar dishes in WW II and cook them in a few seconds. A radar technician who noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket melted when he was working on an active radar had the bright idea of confining the microwaves and using them to cook food. Hence the early Ratheon "radar range".

So it's not so crazy that someone would learn to reverse engineer (in a sense different from the usual one:-) a microwave oven into a radar unit, or into an information transmission link. The biggest catch, I imagine, is the need for near line of sight (so you'd need to be very high up or very near the border) and a suitable receiver on the other side. Also the fact that moisture attenuates the frequencies used in microwave ovens by design, but I imagine that's less of an issue in Libya.

rgb

Re:Laser

[nurb432]

And if you use visible light lasers, you deserve to get detected.

RFC1149

[Nimey]

Who'd look twice at some pigeons?

Re:"microwave OVENS"? Nope, not a typo

[wierd_w]

Perhaps if you replaced the magnetron with a custom built klystron of similar size, it would work.

There are any number of "Extremely small" CRT devices you can get for pennies. (Like the eye-pieces of old VHS camcorders) These are basically a vacuum tube type electron gun, and which with some modifications, could be used to drive such a tiny klystron quite effectively.

[really blurry image I found on the internet depicting the tiny size of the CRT in question]

Amusingly, you could probably use the already existing magnetic deflection system of the CRT to help modulate the beam inside the klystron waveguide.

Obligatory wikipedia on Klystrons

Using one of those as the transmitter of your directional antenna would net you a VERY long distance connection.