If the authorities sought to disrupt these networks, would it not be possible to jam Bluetooth (and Wi-Fi) signals within a certain area?
E.g. say for a p2p-twitter app, users A and B go into the exchange with their own versions of the global p2p-twitter feed, and exit the exchange with a merged version.
You could do federated, store-and-forward direct messaging, too. We already have a protocol for a very similar use-case: SMTP. :) Of course, with a sometimes-offline P2P mesh you usually don't know if any given hop decreases the distance to the destination.
You'd probably end up just merging all existing messages, so that everyone has everyone elses "email", and filter out the messages belonging to you via asymmetric encryption. So it's just an application of the above p2p-twitter thing. Public messages could be unencrypted.
I think some blockchain-based messaging systems work in a similar way, since there everybody has everybody elses messages per definition. Maybe a blockchain-based protocol is a good fit anyway, probably not though since I'm not sure how it would do the merge(A,B) function.
Moreover, there's no way to police bad actors in a local mesh, and no global blockchain you can trust.
[1] http://www.jammerfromchina.com/categories/WiFi%7B47%7DBlueto... [2] https://github.com/DanMcInerney/wifijammer
Might not be ideal for covert communication though, since you could see someone broadcasting without any special equipment.
This is not low bandwidth if you have the right tools.
Only on the jammed frequencies. Police radios and such will keep working.
However, there is a FRS band which is the same as the US.
Moreover, the bands used by "push-to-talk" radios are ones that transmit reasonably far for lowish power and penetrate walls. No reason to think they'll be different worldwide.
Hong Kong is rather concentrated.
Not to mention there was a tremendous amount of sympathetic coverage. Time 2011 person of the year was the protester. It was a huge conversation that entered the common narrative.
Apples and Oranges. Yeah, there are best practices for dealing with crowds and there needs to be security at huge protests. The cloak and the shield is a very fine line.
I know for a fact in Canada there was no wifi/cell/BT blocking. And I cannot find a reputable article the provides any evidence that this occurred.
The strategy for dealing with the protests in the US was just to wait them out and then when the media got bored they sent in the police to clear out the camps while people weren't paying attention.