What is combat? It is a system dependent on “passive” signals from phones.
The best one can hope for is a way to sign up for broadcasts telling people to turn off their phones when the jackboots show up but that is arguably even worse for many reasons. First it involves signing up for said broadcasts (“So. Mr Anderson. Why would you sign up for ICE Alerts if you aren’t an illegal immigrant?”).
But second it takes away all way to coordinate a resistance. It is why so many of the big fat white guys in loose fitting hawaian shirts at protests are ready to give out free faraday bags to “protect people from the cops”. We outnumber the cops and the soldiers often ten or even twenty to one. But without the ability to coordinate, we all get picked off one group at a time or driven into a wall of shields and vans to be disappeared in if nobody is recording (which works a lot better if said recording is streaming to The Cloud). Take away phones and you turn The Many into The Few.
A couple decades back I lived in a… not great part of town. And it was pretty much common knowledge that when all our cell phones (still flip phones) would lose all signal that there was a police raid about to go down. Ridiculously illegal but… who you gonna call? So if you had someone you needed to call (let a loved one know where you were… or let a buddy know to start flushing) you needed a payphone or to borrow a landline.
I’ve been privy to some talks where we assessed things like Meshtastic as tools for the folk organizing protests and the like. In theory they are nice. In practice they are an even bigger red flag that can be easily sniffed out and used to trump up charges of premeditation and the like.
What is combat? It is a system dependent on “passive” signals from phones.
The best one can hope for is a way to sign up for broadcasts telling people to turn off their phones when the jackboots show up but that is arguably even worse for many reasons. First it involves signing up for said broadcasts (“So. Mr Anderson. Why would you sign up for ICE Alerts if you aren’t an illegal immigrant?”).
But second it takes away all way to coordinate a resistance. It is why so many of the big fat white guys in loose fitting hawaian shirts at protests are ready to give out free faraday bags to “protect people from the cops”. We outnumber the cops and the soldiers often ten or even twenty to one. But without the ability to coordinate, we all get picked off one group at a time or driven into a wall of shields and vans to be disappeared in if nobody is recording (which works a lot better if said recording is streaming to The Cloud). Take away phones and you turn The Many into The Few.
A couple decades back I lived in a… not great part of town. And it was pretty much common knowledge that when all our cell phones (still flip phones) would lose all signal that there was a police raid about to go down. Ridiculously illegal but… who you gonna call? So if you had someone you needed to call (let a loved one know where you were… or let a buddy know to start flushing) you needed a payphone or to borrow a landline.
I’ve been privy to some talks where we assessed things like Meshtastic as tools for the folk organizing protests and the like. In theory they are nice. In practice they are an even bigger red flag that can be easily sniffed out and used to trump up charges of premeditation and the like.
I’m sure if the device or operator is struck hard enough with a hammer, it stops working.