
Catalan separatists have tooled up with decentralized app for civil disobedience - elies
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/17/catalan-separatists-have-tooled-up-with-a-decentralized-app-for-civil-disobedience/
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Behind the scenes — where unknown administrators are accessing its data and
> devising and managing protest actions to distribute via the app — there may
> be an entirely centralized view of available human protest resources. But
> it’s not clear what the other side of the platform looks like. Our source
> was unable to show it to us or articulate what it looks like.

It doesn’t seem as decentralized as advertised. The authorities just have to
coerce some of the admins and they have a very nice view of what is going on
in the movement in real-time.

~~~
narag
The authorities _are_ the admins. Everybody knows Torra is behind the
protests.

~~~
squiggleblaz
Torra is the Catalan premier isn't he? But the one to worry about is the
Spanish PM. Even the Catalan authorities are subject to their anti-democratic,
anti rule-of-law authoritarian whim and fancy: Some are living in exile and
others are living in prison for work they did will Catalan authorities.

~~~
Oletros
> to their anti-democratic, anti rule-of-law authoritarian whim and fancy

From whom?

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Lucadg
It seems to have a central point of failure.

Not really uncensorable after all.

And not even open sourced.

If the government takes over the admins many people will be in trouble.

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annoyingnoob
Recently spent a couple of weeks in Barcelona. I love the culture there. The
passion of the Catalan people is impressive.

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descala
Spanish police has begun seizure of the web site distributing the app
[https://app.tsunamidemocratic.cat/](https://app.tsunamidemocratic.cat/)

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jdc
There's any interesting spectrum of tools could rub the powers that be the
wrong way all the way to all out rebellion.

That being said maybe this app is just well-marketed groupware.

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ChristianBundy
Very cool. I'm curious to see how this compares to SSB.

~~~
rsre
This is not a protocol and it's not decentralised at all. Only the admins can
control the app and its users.

It's not related to Scuttlebutt at all.

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kilburn
TLDR: Everyone seems to be assuming that there's a single point of failure,
and someone gets to see all the information. I would definitely _not_ build
the thing like that if I was the one doing it.

There's not much information about how the application works. What we know is:

\- The app _seems_ to use a RetroShare network behind-the-scenes [1].

\- RetroShare is a decentralized, serverless, peer-to-peer, meshed,
distributed network. When you join you generate a pgp key for yourself and
then add "friends" by grabbing their public keys.

\- The app needs to be activated through a QR generated from another person's
app who's already in.

\- The app monitors your location and only shows you close-by actions.

What I would like to confirm:

\- Whether the QR is the same for everyone, the same for every person sharing
it, or generated on a by-share basis

\- Whether RetroShare is actually used or not.

Assumptions I make:

\- There's a non-trivial organization behind this

\- The organizers do not want to be discovered, and want to have as much
"plausible deniability" as possible (they are risking jail time)

Given all the above, here's how I would build this application:

\- Create 3 (or 5) "root" keys. The very top people in the org get those.

\- When you join the network (by scanning someone's QR), you join the
RetroShare network, but also get the root keys id's.

\- The app is now ready to handle some message types from the root keys:

1\. STOP. Accepted when signed by any of the active root keys. The app stops
sending messages.

2\. ADD_ZONE. Accepted when signed by a majority of the root keys. Adds a new
zone (a geographical bounding box) along with the public key of the zone's
commander (someone who can organize stuff in that area).

3\. REMOVE_ZONE. Accepted when signed by at least two root keys. Removes a
zone because it either has no activity or has been compromised.

\- During normal operation, the app tracks the currently active zones and the
corresponding zone-masters. It monitors your location, and if you are within a
zone it sends "in-zone" notifications to the zone-master.

\- The zone-master collects such notifications and sends direct messages to
people in their zone when an action is to take place.

As I see it, this would be the simplest setup to accomplish the organizations'
goals without much possibility for compromise. As soon as a zone is
compromized it can be nuked, and the whole thing can be nuked quickly if some
root is compromised too.

You could then start refining this basic idea with extra functionalities. For
instance:

\- Add/remove root keys to avoid having to nuke everything if a root gets
compromised.

\- Get the app to send "in-zone" messages to random zones from time to time
and then filter received actions according to actual location. This would
prevent the organizers (or someone who gets to observe the traffic) from
inferring the users' real location.

[1] [https://retroshare.cc/](https://retroshare.cc/)

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t-away-123568
I have trouble with first world separatist/independence movements (Quebec,
Scotland, Basque, Catalan, etc) where it seems there is little real present
day issue other than what seems from the outside to be historical grievance
and ego.

~~~
WanderPanda
Does it matter? If a locally grouped majority wants to seperate from a bigger
structure they should be allowed to, everything else is evil.

~~~
oliverx0
What majority? In Catalonia less than 50% of people want independence. It just
so happens that the minority is louder.

~~~
nomusuari
Catalans did a referendum for independence. The Yes won by 90%. But the
referendum was not legal according to the Spanish law. The spanish won't allow
a legal referendum because they now there is a majority who want independence.

~~~
Oletros
> Catalans did a referendum for independence.

No, Catalans didn't did a referendum, Catalan Government did on illegal
referendum

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stretchwithme
There won't be peace on Earth until people give up on the idea that they have
the right to coerce other people into political relationships.

~~~
slapshot
We (USA) fought a war over that. The "if we agreed to stay together then we
have to stay together" side won.

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scythe
The Civil War was _not_ about some kind of ideal of decentralization and
certainly was not about today's pining for city-states. It was mostly about
slavery, with some esoteric political theory tacked on to the Confederate
Constitution to save face.

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wolco
It was about only allowing white labor in the west.

It was about the Lincoln winning without any representation from the south.

