Only having experience in the US, I can tell you conclusively that if the company states it's job is to make and promote poison for untrained people to spray everywhere, let's call it "CircleHeavenward" for example, and they successfully convince enough people to buy and use it, but then it's found they knowingly told people to spray it unsafely and knew it would kill millions of people but his it, and millions of the customers neighbors are now dying, absolutely nothing will be done. Because they're a successful corporation and therefore completely immune to any responsibility for any outright criminal activity. Doubly so it they can successfully claim more than one person was involved in carrying out that criminal activity, and therefore the responsibility for it is distributed.
Syngenta got sued over paraquat and has already agreed to pay more than $100M to one set of defendants while still being actively sued by others. Corteva is paying in excess of a billion dollars over PFAS. Bayer/Monsanto is paying in excess of ten billion over glyphosate. That's only what they've already agreed to pay; others can still sue them for more.
A lot of stuff is e.g. you have an old study showing that glyphosate causes cancer in mice in amounts orders of magnitude higher than typical human exposure. Plaintiffs are going to claim that means they knew it was dangerous, and maybe that's even enough to win their lawsuit. But lots of things cause cancer in mice in excessive amounts. Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew it would cause cancer in humans in ordinary amounts? If not then you don't have enough to put them in prison. Also, which "them" is it? If you want a person, the actually guilty party is typically not the CEO, it's a middle manager who made the decision three decades ago and is now a retired non-billionaire. If you collected enough evidence then you could potentially put a middle class grandpa in prison for it. The actual reason this doesn't often happen isn't that corporations are rich.
But also, what does this have to do with the bureaucracy involved in entity formation? Is your theory that making it harder to start a small business would somehow have made it more likely for Monsanto to be prosecuted for whatever they did? How?
Why would they bother? Super low bandwidth unencrypted communication they can triangulate if they really need to sounds like a perfect thing to let keep running and just monitor. Then you can triangulate just the "seditious" people who incriminate themselves.
I guess if you were relying on the meshtastic network as a backbone network replacement, which I'm not sure much of anyone is even currently setup for and I've heard isnt really feasible with the naive meshtastic toy implementation, you could be sending encrypted traffic. But then you have to have pre-shared encryption keys for participants and it will significantly lose it's usefulness for adding new adopters.
The government isn't going to hand to do that, that's already what Google's planning to do anyway. They'd just have to tell Google to take down certain apps so they're no longer on the Google "approved" list, which would deactivate them on your device during next network connection (like most Google "services" on Android, I'm sure these too would bypass the system VPN as well) as well as making them unavailable from the sole allowed download source. You know, like they did with ICE Block already.
It seems very unlikely the US would take the approach of shutting down the internet to prevent communication. All the internet infrastructure is hardwired for US surveillance data collection, so it's already a perfect honeypot. Why shutdown your honey pot?
More likely to be useful in the US is communication that is actually private, secure, and not centralized, but the underlying communication channel if unlikely to be relevant. Signal for example would almost certainly have thier IP blocked in the area, or their servers taken down because their completely centralized and therefore easy to block. Realistically something that can leverage an adversarial network to implement mesh communication that can be obfuscated (so it's not easily detected and blocked) is more useful in the US.
I suspect use cases are more likely community organizing and info sharing.
It supports forums and private groups that are E2EE, and "blog" posts that can include RSS reblogging.
The forums and private groups do bidirectional syncing and merging of all updates with anyone in the forum/group, so that gives you the equivalent of near-infinite multihop among trusted peers for large forums/groups. And it means every person has a complete copy, so it's nearly impossible to find all copies to censor it.
With the blogging of reblogged RSS feeds, you can even have people acting like news carriers for viral-ike person-to-person information transfer as well. Even if that does require a little more manual curation by the "transmission vectors" than forum/group posts.
Remember too that when things get bad enough people become ready to give up thier lives if necessary, and this may just be a way to reduce (but not eliminate) the need to actually sacrifice thier life for their cause. Large groups of people may collectively believe it's worth being individually captured and imprisoned or murdered to ensure the larger group is aware of what's happening.
Briar mentions "mailboxes", where you can stick up collectors wherever you want. It's not as nice as repeaters that would build a multihop mesh network for you, but one advantage of not doing multihop is that you get at least initial insecure identification before any identifiable secure communication is attempted so even if the Military Police are watching you, they won't be able to tell you even have Briar unless they can spoof a device for someone you have as a contact and have a waiting message for (or the BLE device ID of one of your mailbox devices). Those aren't hard to spoof, but learning what they are can be more difficult than if you're broadcasting to anyone that will listen like multihop requires.
It's a manual for setup (in Farsi, you can click to other languages) that needs to be as accessible as possible to the least technology a literate people in the world as well as the ultra techy. Often people that have extremely limited data connection or no data connection as well. It has to be as simple as possible, and as clear as possible.
Check the main landing page and you can see it's a relatively modern site, they just gave a very restricted target audience the manual needs to be available for.
That was Bridgefy that required initial online access to setup. Briar doesn't and never has.
Traceability of Briar users, if not the actual content, is certainly potentially worse than something like what Bitchat claims (don't use Bitchat it's provably not secure or private at all) with it's traffic obfuscation and multihop. However, the lack of multihop also makes it less promiscuous, so someone would have to be monitoring when you came in contact with the transfer source or destination, unlike multihop that just broadcasts to anyone so they can hopefully relay it.
that's why its difficult to trust these apps? i've been out of the game for years and i would rather be on the fence about the whole thing.
the problem i saw back in 2019 was adoption. it just happened suddenly and the scaremongering done by the government was top notch. literally any anti-government tweet or post was "deemed social media misuse", how dare you question the might of the great nation.
what i am saying is, in that heated environment, no one wanted to be the one holding the short straw so this tech did not play out, simply out of personal safety.
Check the news from the past year. If you care about security or privacy, Bitchat doesn't actually have either according to !any independent security audits), so I'd stay away.
If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.
You should definitely read the news about bitchat. It doesnt actually have basically any security or privacy from all the dozens of independent security audit findings. Jack even said it was vibe coded and never audited.
Only having experience in the US, I can tell you conclusively that if the company states it's job is to make and promote poison for untrained people to spray everywhere, let's call it "CircleHeavenward" for example, and they successfully convince enough people to buy and use it, but then it's found they knowingly told people to spray it unsafely and knew it would kill millions of people but his it, and millions of the customers neighbors are now dying, absolutely nothing will be done. Because they're a successful corporation and therefore completely immune to any responsibility for any outright criminal activity. Doubly so it they can successfully claim more than one person was involved in carrying out that criminal activity, and therefore the responsibility for it is distributed.
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