Anonymous develops system for secure data over ham radio

In the Snowden era, it's pretty clear that the Internet as a worldwide communication medium that would permit activists to securely communicate and disseminate information has not been effective: governments appear to be surprisingly and increasingly effective at clamping down on, censoring, controlling Internet information as well as using it to track down dissidents. Mobile telephony isn't much better as it's a related technology that suffers many of the same ills as TCP/IP with regard to anonymity. So the privacy gurus are turning to a technology you'd probably forgotten: Ham Radio .

Airchat, they call it, and it's got a few characteristics that make it very interesting and useful . The group states:

The goal of the project is to communicate directly, without using Internet or cellular infrastructure. ... We traded bandwidth for freedom, simplicity and low cost.

It's not a fast protocol, since packet data over audio channels is necessarily low bandwidth. But its promise to offer real anonymity is a big deal. And not surprisingly, these enterprising hackers are having fun with it. For starters, to anonymise communications and handle encryption and error correction, the system uses a packet they call the Lulzpacket .

Curious? go check out the code for yourself on github .