Chat without data

Christophe Daligault hasn't slept in
three days. On the line from San
Francisco at 3.48am his time, Open
Garden's Vice President of Sales and
Marketing describes how the
company's FireChat app has achieved
unprecedented popularity with Hong
Kong's student-led protesters.
"The biggest problem we have is that
so many people are using the app that
the speed of text coming through to us
is too fast to monitor it all," he tells
WIRED.co.uk as he explains that the
app was downloaded over 110,000
times during the 24 hours between
Sunday lunchtime and Monday
afternoon in Hong Kong.
FireChat allows people to communicate
without requiring internet access.
Phones are connected via their own
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals alone in a
peer-to-peer mesh network. This is
particularly useful when large crowds
congregate in small areas, overloading
local mobile towers which can't keep
up with demand.
That's exactly what's been happening
in Hong Kong. Unlike a traditional
mobile network , the more people who
connect to a mesh network, the
stronger and wider it is -- which is why
the app has been praised for allowing
demonstrators to continue
communicating despite the size of the
protest.
However, there's a problem. FireChat
isn't private and for activists
attempting to dodge police attempts at
dispersal, that could be problematic.
Daligault admits he's worried by the
prospect of protesters' chatroom
discussions on FireChat being
monitored by police or government
agents.
Enthusiastic reports in the press have
labelled FireChat as " more clandestine
and less traceable " than internet-based
communications, but Daligault is
emphatic on this point. "Messages are
still public," he says. "You write
something up on FireChat and it's
almost as if you put it on Twitter.
Anybody can read it."
The last big surge for FireChat took
place earlier this year, when Iraqis
flocked to the messaging app in order
to stay in contact with one another
following government restrictions on
internet use. Daligault expressed
similar concerns at the time but now
adds that the stakes today are even
higher. "Iraq now seems very small in
comparison to the scale of what's
happening in Hong Kong," he
comments.
Sukey apps help protesters
avoid police kettles
According to Daligault, the Hong Kong
protesters have been savvy in
associating chat rooms with specific
locations such as street corners where
they plan to meet or organise some
part of their demonstration. The
FireChat team has picked up on
discussions about these meetings as
well as conversations over where to
acquire gas masks, tents and water
bottles. Advice on how to avoid the
police or waterproof electronics in case
they get drenched by water cannon has
also been shared.
Naturally, however, these discussions
are publicly viewable and there could
be some risk to protesters if they aren't
careful with what they type. There's no
clear indication of when encryption
might be coming to FireChat. Though it
is planned, Daligault says a release date
has not been decided. "It may be six
months away," he comments.
#OccupyCentral #HKStudentStrike
Pls remember msgs not encrypted yet. Dont use
your real name.

Nadim Kobeissi, creator of secure
messaging app Cryptocat says that it
wouldn't make sense to encrypt
FireChat chatrooms if anyone could
join, since sharing the encryption key
indiscriminately would again fail to
keep conversations private.
"FireChat can [however] benefit from
encryption by using it to safeguard
message integrity and the identity of
individual chat members, in order to
prevent an attacker from forging or
modifying messages, or impersonating
another user on the mesh network,"
explains Kobeissi via email.
For now, though, if FireChat users in
Hong Kong or elsewhere have
something to say which they want to
keep secure, Daligault has a simple
piece of advice: "Don't type it."