Anyone can set up their own Intranet. The only difference is how many people have access to it.

i am talking about more of an internet than an intranet. the fax machine network in the ussr would send politically controversial newsletters across the country. i am talking about a tyranical government here. or a system where the internet is taken over. i can see a few levels of problem.
1. least bad: the internet becomes like radio or television is currently (following as they did from freedom to corporate ownership). in that case the *internet* is owned by a few giant corporations and isps work with government (as they already are but moreso) to make sure the only domains people can access are of these few corporations so all sites have to be subdomains and can be shut down by the corporations (ie you can have a youtube channel or blogger account but not your own server in your house).
2. the government puts in a firewall to cut off polically controversial topics as is done in china and other countries
3. the government uses the internet to enforce its ideas about intellectual property basically as an organ of the media industry
4. the government has basically complete control over the internet and will seek out and prosecute anyone who tries to run their own website (as they do not with pirate radio stations).

there are probably more scenarios, but you get the idea that i am not talking about if its possible to have an intranet i am talking about a real world communications network to circumvent tyranical laws...

bolshoi. That's who blankflag reminds me of! bloshoi.... yeah, that same vein of troll....

i mean as they do now with pirate radio

you seem to lack a basic understanding of how the internet works...and how people already get around things like the Great Firewall of China...and how surveillance is a much larger concern than the internet being "shut down"

there is an internet patriot act already written right now that would institute massive government control over the internet and likely make it illegal for individuals to have their own webservers among countless other insanity. it is sitting around waiting for the next *attack* to happen (an attack over the internet affecting infrastructure or something). one that the elites desperately want to happen sometime soon. so this is an actual concern of mine. and i would say i do know something about how the internet works.

anyway what are you trying to imply, erist, that the us government does not have the capacity to enforce a law to restrict the internet to a few corporations that buy rights in it? you underestimate the power of the us government. look at transmitting radio or using shortwave or any of that. the government requires permits to do all that, and they monitor almost everything on the internet now. were you aware of that? and they monitor it all too. so if you think using the existing infrastructure and protocols you can somehow get around the government without them knowing about it... then you are just wrong.

Pirate radio is significantly easier because:
1) It's a one-way transmission
2) It's significantly lower bandwidth

yes. but pirate radio is broadcasting to many people. and the current internet is broadcasting to many people. it is generally known among the people. if you are talking about just a few people connecting to each other to send a bit of information here or there, then it is not really pirate internet. it is like saying if you regularly phone a few people on conference calls and talk to them that is somehow pirate radio. i think the biggest problem is scaling it up to get a wide audience.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/kill-switch-legislation/

People get internet two ways - through a "hard line" connection in their home, or through wireless.

Shutting down hard lines is a rather simple matter for the government to enforce.

Shitting down wireless is more difficult....because people have the ability to set up their own broadcast sites and create local networks - but having them large enough/powerful enough to create a pirate internet would be a difficult matter - as any signal I can pick up to talk to my pirate friends, can, of course, be picked up by government sniffers as well.

Obviously a *tyrannical* government - the premise of the OP - could shut most people out of the internet easily, and could track down pirate broadcasts easily, meaning they would have to constantly be on the move. Lucky for the tyrannical government, the sky will be filled with drones which can home in on illegal broadcast frequencies, or any broadcast without the proper security overlays, and target them for hellfire missiles...

also you will admit that a municipality could ban casinos. or even gambling. you wouldnt tell me that its impossible to ban casinos would you? if me and my friends are making bets with each other we are not going to jail. the government cannot stop a few friends from communicating, they never have. what they can and will do if givern the opportunity is shut down anything that gets big enough to be noticed. if they can.

if they do shut down the wired network then we are screwed. without that you have no internet. the internet has servers in many countries in many cities with different content coming in from all over the place. see that is what i am saying. if you have your *intranet* with mybb and timbuktoo (i have no idea how to spell that) local news, then is that the internet? all the content on there now, wikipedia, youtube, all the chat forums and online books, all that will be inaccessible by the public.

they probably could shut it down, but likely temporarily in a so-called state of emergency. i think the real threat is corporate takeover. and then once the corporations have ownership they can slowly restrict who can put content on their sites and what content until all content becomes corporate content as happened to radio and television.

Radio is likely still the best way to communicate with a wide audience without government approval.

1) It has an excellent range-to-power ratio
2) It is hard to jam without interfering with other signals
3) It is cheap and easy

The only real disadvantage is its not secure.

The next best thing I would say is SMS messages. Cell phones will likely continue to function and text messages can reach thousands of people very quickly. If you have a burner they can't really be traced either.

blankflag - is your post about a tyrannical governmnet? Or a corporate controlled internet? Vastly different beasts.

Abge - radio signals are still the best - and like I said, you could set up internet networks with pirate radio signals - you'd just need to keep your base of operations moving.

In actuality, it's probably not going to be a difficult thing to accomplish for a well-organized underground fighting against a t-gov.

Not cure why you think cell phones would continue to work though. Burner or not, without an active cell tower your cell phone is a fancy paperweight. A government could secure the phone system such that only prperly encrypted devices could use them - I think shutting down a cell phone network would be child's play.

@krellin

re: Phones: I'm just basing that one what I've seen recently in countries in turmoil. They seem to be using phones a lot to communicate in ways their government doesn't approve of.

re: Radio Internet. Maybe, but it would be tricky. Everything would have to be ad hoc and it would be easy for the government to just blast a specific frequency with white noise to jam it.

Abge - I guess the question is whether or not those countries truly tried to shut down cell tower access or not. I don't know enough about how it works, perhaps.

But...Verizon doesn't play on a AT&T tower...and so on. You have to have the right protocols in your phone to play on cell towers. Therefore it seems as if a motivated government would be able to easily shut down all cell towers and activate a network that only works if you have their sim card.

On the flip side, broadcasting a jamming signal over the entire nation to shut down all the frequencies I could set up an ad-hoc network on seems to be a daunting concept.

I don't know the exact frequency range that computer networks operate on, but given that you can have many active networks showing up at once, I'm assuming that the government would have to broadcast a range of jamming signals..

also, not sure how difficult it would be for an underground movement to set up wireless modems that would pick up a new frequency range -- I'm assuming it isn't that difficult...so I still think a pirate wireless internet would not be that difficult - after all, I have probably six or seven devices in my house right now off the top of my head that are wireless and can pick up and broadcast signals and act as a hub (including my phone, which would be useless as a phone, but still useful as an internet tool.)

i started thinking about it because of this corbett report podcast
http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-262-solutions-pirate-internet/
he talks about cell phones communicating peer to peer
but also mentions that you can communicate from computers peer to peer via wifi

the other thing is it depends how tyrannical the government is.
if we can get a large portion of the population to be nodes in this network
then it will be hard politically to crack down in a supposedly free country.
because then it will be obvious that they are going against the wishes of the population

if it is corporate ownership then maybe at least at the start they will not crack down on a *mesh network* because it doesnt infringe on the supposed property rights the corporations have in the existing internet (until they expand those property rights further). on the one extreme you cant do anything on the other extreme the government cant do anything. i think the interesting quesitons are in the middle when the government isnt totally tyranical banning everything and sniffing out every signal nor are they just allowing anything to go on without any restrictions at all.

"You have to have the right protocols in your phone to play on cell towers."

Yeah, but I strongly suspect you could forge a SIM card if you really wanted to.

"On the flip side, broadcasting a jamming signal over the entire nation to shut down all the frequencies I could set up an ad-hoc network on seems to be a daunting concept. "

All they'd really need to do is find the signal once and then jam that.

"I don't know the exact frequency range that computer networks operate on, but given that you can have many active networks showing up at once, I'm assuming that the government would have to broadcast a range of jamming signals.."

It really has nothing to do with computer networks. You can send information on any EM wave. For attenuation, though, it would probably be in the MHz range.

"also, not sure how difficult it would be for an underground movement to set up wireless modems that would pick up a new frequency range -- I'm assuming it isn't that difficult"

Well, yeah, that's the real question. If you can do that easily, then you're probably good to go.

A really smart guy named Bruce Schneier wrote an article about this. His findings are basically that it would be basically impossible for the US Government to shut down the internet as we know it.

If this kind of stuff bothers you, you could always consider a $20 donation to the EFF.
They've been defending your right to jailbreak your phone, modify your playstation, exchange files with friends and lots of other privileges, including internet access, for years.
www.eff.org

I'm a card carrying member.

I'm not sure why anyone would bother with any of this though. It will certainly be easier to just hack into the Government's Internet than try to make your own.

but the governments internet will not allow you to visit many sites. if they are smart it is not easy to hack. right now you can open your computer, open a browser, type in some address, and go there via some servers that help route the information to you based on the address you give them.

but you could imagine a game console that only lets you go to netflicks or their game store or something but nowhere else online. if they tell firmware and software manufacturers to work together, they could come up with a way to make it very difficult to go anywhere but a few places that they allow you to. and what if they make hacking the existing infrastructure some serious offense and throw you in jail for it? then a lot of people will likely not try it. and i can see them doing that.

i think i like the eff from what ive seen. im not prepared to donate money to a nonprofit, certainly not one getting funding from those elites like soros because they give up a lot of power to get that funding. they have to have board members that control what they do, and that is a negative. but i think they are doing some good work.

"if they are smart it is not easy to hack."

Yeah, ok, let me know how that works out.

ok i do not own a video game console, but i think the wii or maybe other ones connected to the internet just to update software or some other limited functions but you couldnt browse the internet. and i know some of the antipiracy/antihacking legislation that was proposed made it a serious criminal offense to do any sort of cracking/hacking of hardware. put the two together.
even without that legislation, i think the vast majority of wii users were not hacking their consoles to use the internet. to be honest you dont seem like the type to have the balls to hack hardware once there is a serious criminal penalty at stake. but even if you did i can guarantee you you will represent a very small portion of the population. if nobody is using your network then, again, it is not the internet. it needs many users to be anything like the internet.

and how exactly would you do it? the government would see where your packets are going. they monitor that now. so what are you even proposing? you dont seem to appreciate the gravity of the threat here. one day they will do a false-flag online, like they did 9/11. there will be a nuclear meltdown or who knows and then this legislation will be passed later that day and you will say to yourself *well that sucks, i guess the government does have the power afterall*.

@blank

A computer is a computer and computers can be hacked. I don't care if it's a PC, an N64 or a fucking vending machine.

Now, it's true that probably only a small group of people will be doing most of the work, but once they figure it out, a large portion of the population will follow. Just look at how many people torrent or jailbreak their iPhone. Most of those people probably can't even configure their router. It would catch on.

Also, I'm a bet confused by your definition of the Internet. If I create a system of interconnected networks, that is an internet. It really doesn't matter if it only has 100 users.

"you dont seem to appreciate the gravity of the threat here."

Packets can be masked and IP/MAC addresses can be spoofed. It's really not that hard. Plus if your network is built off a virus that turns innocent people's computers into ad hoc servers, they'll never find you.

they will use the hacking excuse, the piracy excuse, protecting the children excuse they will use anything. after this false-flag, the way the media is now with guns - it will be like that with the internet. *why does anyone need their own webserver* *end the madness!* *we dont want to shut down the internet, we just want people to register their websites with their isps as subdomains* or some such thing. you dont think it will happen but they want it to badly. that podcast went into the different curtailments of internet rights that were proposed. sopa/pipa, then acta then some other ones i forget the names, then obamas executive order and now sopa is being sneaked back into the legislature hoping that people forgot about it. so 5 in the past, what, year or something. and this is even before a serious false-flag.

how many people would jailbreak the iphone if the proposed legislation to make it a felony had past, do you think?

@blank

Are you aware of the words you are typing or is completely autonomous?

passed

"how many people would jailbreak the iphone if the proposed legislation to make it a felony had past, do you think?"

Probably about the same as the number of people who smoke pot (Possession is a Class D Felony)

completely autonomous. i am an account created by those evil people who are secretly trying to deconsolidate power.

ok whatever. fine. what do i care. just dont do anything. dont be concerned at all. those in power know what is best for you, so who cares what happens. if there is something to be concerned about the media will tell you, like co2 or guns or iran or patriot groups or something. if you dont want to see the problems in the world then i cant really do anything.

I never said this would be good. I just think it's awfully far fetched. Also, I'm just trying to point out how there would always be work-arounds, even in a very draconian society.

@blankflag

I understand that some people are indifferent to various of their rights, and I certainly understand that some people's temperaments allow them to ignore any information they find disturbing. I further understand that among the literate are a modest percentage of quietists and national socialists, people that would prefer to allow a centralization of power rather than to oppose one.

But what really baffles me is, even though many people would prefer to stay out of stuff like this, how many of them go on to try to make people like you feel stupid for caring about these sorts of issues, for trying to affect positive change. If I had to assign a cause, I think that it's their sense of guilt at their own laziness for not being stronger activists, even about the things that they care about.

ok before i leave this thread i just want to tell people that this is happening now. there were those megaupload type sites, that many people paid money to put legitimate files on to store that werent pirated anything and perfectly legal. but the obama justice dept went in seized all the servers and people lost their data and never got it back. do you think that was fine? and obama did pass that executive order. and the tpp with its internet regulations was signed. and although sopa/pipa and acta and sispa were all shut down by massive protest, cispa is now somehow brought up in the house again after the protests have died down. will people be up for another protest to stop it? eventually these laws will get through making it even more controlled.

now some country, tuvalu or something sold the .tv domain name to a private company to raise money. now what would you say if the governments decided to sell off their top level domains for money? it is the capitalist way, right? more property rights to sell the better? now the domains are controlled by the corporations they will only allow websites that they want, and through aquisitions all the domains will probably eventually be owned by a few companies if we use the media as any guide.

what if the government says due to piracy or some cyber terrorism threat they will cut the international internet lines to the public. or cut internet access to certain countries, like china or something (although it would likely be iran or syria instead given the media is censoring their media on sattellite) but they say its fine because the popular sites like baidu or whatever can just get servers in america if there is an american demand for chinese search. another excuse is that laws are different in different countries. if something is not obscene somewhere else it could be obscene here so it makes sense to only allow national access, or use internet embargo against countries just like they have any other embargo.

what if they then make a law saying you cant use ip addresses to get to a website, you need to only use domains? or you could even still have ips but then those domains own regions of the ip address range so that the whole range is covered. (like radio now)? if the isps and the colleges and other major nodes start following this protocol then the internet will be under this protocol. whatever newamazinginternet you come up with will not be the internet, it will not have the millions of documents searchable from anywhere in the world.

i guarantee you these and many others have been thought up by the elites. there are probably elite funded think tanks just thinking of every possible way to shut down the internet. if we dont think about it ourselves then we are at a significant disadvantage so i hope people realize that there is a threat here.

if you are going to be convinced by the media that any serious questions are crazy conspiracy theories and not worth thinking about then we have already lost. because those thinktanks are actively thinking of ways to get internet censorship, so maybe they know better than to think it is just a crazy conspiracy theory.

"what if they then make a law saying you cant use ip addresses to get to a website, you need to only use domains? or you could even still have ips but then those domains own regions of the ip address range so that the whole range is covered. (like radio now)?"

I wonder how many of our elected "representatives" could cogently (excuse the pun) explain what an IP address is and how DNS works. Makes you wonder who, exactly, is calling the shots when it comes to technology policy in this country.