1: Know exactly where every transmitter is. This means they can find you in meatspace even more easily than they can on the hard-wired internet.
2: Listen in on your transmissions without all of the legal issues associated with wiretapping. To make sure they can do so, they would probably need to pass a law prohibiting the use of many types of cryptography on unlicensed RF transmissions. Such a law would be much easier to sell to the general public "because the terrorists could be using it to coordinate attacks." If you break this law, expect a knock on your door almost instantly because of #1, above.
When you combine #1 and #2, busting "pirates" becomes trivially easy: somebody sees a "suspicious" file in your transmissions, localizes your transmitter, and a few minutes later you get a knock on your door.
There's other stuff, like injecting false traffic, etc.
Point: it tends to be these very gov't lackeys that think just because the signal is in the air that it can be intercepted, decoded, decrypted and its plaintext content recorded.
As to what NSA, et al are currently capable of, I honestly have no idea, but I'm willing to bet some of their capabilities would be surprising (in both directions, depending on which specific capability you were to look at).
Fifteen years ago we had proof of this after the government inadvertently showed its cards via clipper chip, the crusade against PGP, etc. We still have export controls on strong encryption, and there's a good reason for that (well, maybe not a good reason).
I personally figure if people just accept the low speeds of HF instead of expecting full Hulu streaming for everyone, a lot of the problems will be immediately mitigated, but that's unlikely- if only because HF gear is not nearly as cheap and ubiquitous as WiFI.
Suppose you are able to jump the technical barriers - you make the tech happen. I believe it will be at that point when power oligarchy will erect the political, legal barriers against your successes. Worse, they'll probably use your technology against you.
I realize that it is possibly harder to change that political structure. And, that's assuming that the technical situation is hard enough. But, if you change the political structure, you have less to worry about in the long run. You don't always have to be running.
We really need to abolish IP laws in their current state. We need new IP laws that are reasonable for our current social and political structures and technological realities. Hard, hard work, yes, but otherwise, it's always going to be running for a safe place and getting squashed by the people in power.
As the former operator of the w8lvn packet radio bbs, i can heartily relate to you haven’t lived until you’ve hunted down transient connectivity problems resulting from RF weirdness in urban areas.
And he details real-world experience like "omnidirectional antennas suck".
Essentially, physics is not on your side here.
A lot of smart computer folks that don't have the theoretical or practical experience with RF to understand the issues at hand. But I'm nice enough to point them in the correct direction while resisting the tendency to sigh or giggle at some of the statements I hear.
802.11ac devices are expected to be widely available at the consumer level within three years.
Use omni to find nodes (low bandwidth, high noise), then make the antenna directional for the full communication (higher bandwidth, lower noise).
In scenarios where the darknet is being actively attacked, people are likely going to be less concerned with instant services than any source of reliable, uncensored information. Perhaps we need to really look into ways to get information around following these methodologies and constraints as a supplement to building darknets.
Failing that, even without connecting the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of square miles between cities, I think there is still great potential political, economic and recreational value in decentralized Metropolitan Area Networks, despite the fact that they won't supplant the Internet.
"This will never work." << lol
