[p2p-research] internet blackout in Urumqi

[Andy Robinson]

Up until now, the Chinese "great firewall" has been of limited effectiveness
- news of events, increasingly uncensored, has been finding its way out of
China and back in again with great regularity - and the same can be said of
Iran for instance.  The reason is that web users are very adept with things
like proxies, anonymity software, backdoor tricks like using translation
software to access websites and using web-to-mail, etc.  See for instance
the media coverage of the Weng'an incident, and the Tibet revolt last year.
 The internet has even forced state propagandists to start admitting and
trying to spin events, rather than just denying or refusing to cover them.
China regularly blocks and filters sites, especially at sensitive moments -
on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, they shut down the likes of Twitter
and Facebook, and thousands of university bulletin boards, for the duration.
 Obviously this is of limited use - all the usual tricks apply (accessing
Twitter via a proxy or VPN for example).
This time, they seem to have gone a step further and actually shut down the
Internet - presumably by targeting its physical hardware, turning off the
servers of the ISPs running into the area, maybe even shutting down the
phone network.  This perhaps suggests the vulnerability of virtual networks:
their continued reliance on physical hardware which can be subject to
physical power.  (I've heard before about similar problems when the German
state jammed mobile phone signals to disrupt a protest).  However, I wonder
if the issue is that people are reliant on a limited number of connection
nodes - it seems some tweets are getting out, but not full-scale blog
entries - I would deduce from this that the tweets are coming from mobile
phones, and that the relative paucity of output results from the scarcity of
mobile phones in Urumqi.  Which may be why China has done this but Iran and
Honduras did not.  However, this still raises the question of what might be
done in a context where the state has shut down ISPs and also jammed mobile
phones over a wide area.  Would it still be possible to get information out
and onto the internet?  For instance, to somehow rig up computers to connect
directly to one another using something akin to short-wave radio
transmissions?
There are also very low-tech regimes which are able to control information
flow to some degree, by the very fact of being low-tech.  North Korea, to
some degree Burma, and formerly the Taleban.  But that's a different
question.  I would speculate that the quickest way to bring down the North
Korean regime would be to saturation-bomb the place, not with bombs, but
with radios.
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