Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), a 17-year-old student activist in Hong Kong, had a problem. You will have experienced a version of it yourself: You are at a soccer match or a gig and you need to find a friend, but the crowd means that the network is overloaded and you are unable to get a signal on your handset. The thing that means you need to call someone is the very thing that means you cannot.
For Wong, the problem was more serious: He was not at a soccer match, but organizing the pro-democracy protests that have shaken Hong Kong over the past week. And he was not just worried the network would be overloaded; he was worried that the authorities would block it on purpose.
Each recent major display of social unrest seems to come with a game-changing technological accompaniment: The 2011 London riots were narrated on BlackBerry Messenger. Twitter played an essential role in the Arab Spring. Turkish protesters who found the Internet blocked turned to censor-proof virtual private networks.
Photo: EPA
However, none of those innovations was much use without an Internet connection. For Wong — who was recently released by a Hong Kong court order after more than 40 hours of detention — and his allies in Hong Kong, the answer was an app that allows people to send messages from device to device without mobile reception or the Internet: FireChat.
BLUETOOTH MESH
FireChat looks like an unexceptional venue for inane online chat about sports and TV. However, it is more than that. If the network is down, FireChat can use Bluetooth to talk to nearby users.
Hong Kong protesters might find something satisfying in the way the system works, gaining strength like a movement or a radical idea — not through a top-down imposition, but from thousands of little connections.
Each new participant increases the range and strength of the network.
“Usually, the more people there are in the same location, the less connectivity you get,” said Micha Benoliel, one of the app’s creators. “But with our system, it is the opposite.”
FireChat has already been used in protests in Taiwan, Iran and Iraq, but never on the scale being seen in Hong Kong.
After Wong urged his movement to use it, FireChat got more than 100,000 new sign-ups in Hong Kong in under 24 hours; it has registered 800,000 chat sessions since.
If the Chinese Communist Party is not quite reeling, its opponents’ lives have at least become a little easier.
CAUTION
Of course, users would do well to take care: There is nothing to stop the authorities from hopping onto the network as well.
Benoliel recommends that people avoid using their real names; the app is for information-sharing, not for secrets, he said.
Still, in a sense, that is the point.
“Our mission has always been freedom of speech, to help information to spread. So this is perfect,” he said.
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