The protest in Jantar Mantar, Delhi, ended after Education Minister resigned. But internet shutdowns during the protest, followed by a Govt direction asking GitHub to remove opensource BitChat, concern me as a technologist. Privacy is a fundamental right in India, and personal communication cannot be held hostage to the whims of Govts. Alternate decentralized routes exist, I want to talk about that today.
When mobile data is blocked, your phone still has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. BitChat uses Bluetooth Low Energy to discover nearby phones. Each phone relays packets, so a message can cross several people without towers or a central server. It works best in a dense crowd. Encrypted messages can be stored temporarily on nearby phones and delivered when one later encounters the recipient.
A local Wi-Fi network is another option for a confined site. A RPi Zero 2W can act as both an access point and a local chat server. Even a normal home router can provide the network while phone apps exchange messages directly between connected devices. Several battery-powered portable nodes can widen coverage, but they need a Wi-Fi mesh backhaul that synchronizes messages between them.
For longer range, an engineering option is Meshtastic. Your phone connects over Bluetooth to a LoRa radio, while those radios relay short packets across a wider area. It works well for text, location and coordination. However, every person in the network needs extra hardware, making it harder to deploy spontaneously, and LoRa has too little bandwidth for images or video.
These systems provide local messaging, not internet access. They reach the wider internet only when one node has an external connection. A jammer aimed only at cellular bands would leave Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or LoRa working unless its super wideband(highly unlikely).
Any tool/tech can be misused. That is true of phones, cash and encryption too. That does not justify banning it. When the Govt blocks private communication because it cannot monitor every message, it is actively pursuing surveillance power. The protest may be over, but the precedent remains. Hope this doesn’t repeat again.
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