Who Zone Media, Welcome back to it could happen here, everybody. I am Robert Evans, and I want to start today by kind of proposing a theoretical Right, you wake up in the morning and something is awry. You know, maybe maybe you hear shots, maybe there's some sort of natural disaster. You know, maybe it's that that weird Havana syndron death sound from the Obama movie that just came out on
what was it Netflix? But something's fucked up. And you know, most people, I think especially most people who listen to this podcast, you've probably had conversations with your friends and loved ones about what do we do when the quote unquote apocalypse or shit hits the fan. You know, you've got your friends who maybe you know they have a lot of stored food, or they have some other skill that you think would be useful. And you've got some stuff that's that that that you know you know how
to do. You've got your people right that you would want to be with and around if something's really going wrong out there, because you know how to take care of each other. But how do you get in contact right, assuming you don't all live together, assuming you're not all on some sort of commune type situation, as most people aren't. You're probably scattered throughout the city. Maybe you've got some friends out, you know, in the suburbs, Maybe you've got
some friends who live out in rural land. Maybe you've just got a friend who lives halfway across town. And you know, that's no problem when you've got a phone and you've got you know, Google Maps working. But can you get there on your own? Can you get there or get into contact with them if the streets are all clogged up with cars or whatever, like, how are you going to reach them? How are you going to you know, get in touch in order to figure out
what's going on? And how are you going to stay in touch while you handle whatever you need to handle for whatever is going wrong. Well that's what we're going to talk about today, because if the cell networks are down, if they're being blocked, if you know, the Obama situation happens, there are things you can do to allow you and your friends, comrades, affinity group, whatever you want to call them,
to stay in touch. And a lot of this revolves around a kind of technical usage called a mesh network. And I don't know much about that because I am a big dummy. But a person who is not a dummy is our guest today. They go by Hydroponic Trash on Twitter and they are going to talk to us today about how to set up independent communications networks that do not rely on the standard grid. Hello, and welcome to the show.
Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, thank you for coming on. You posted a thread on Twitter about using You know, it's called like LOWRA low frequency radio. Is that what it stands for?
Yeah, LORA stands technically for long range, but yeah, it's a long range frequency radio that broadcasts a pretty specific wavelength that can travel really far throughout the air. So it's perfect for communications long distance.
And it's if you've got devices set up on this they each basically act as nodes, right, So the more you have the kind of wider signal distribution you get. If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, Like if you've got someone three miles away and then another person five miles to the west of them, then you kind of are able to cover that whole distance.
Yeah, exactly. So think of it like a relay system, right, Yah, one person has a message they send it off to another person. That person passes it on to the next node, and so mesh networks are really resilient when it comes to emergencies, when it comes to protests, when it comes to occupation and conflict zones, because if one node goes down, as long as there's other ones that can pick up that message and keep repeating it and broadcasting it out.
So it's a really interesting piece of technology that is similar to traditional radios, but also different because all the communications can be encrypted end to end, which is a huge delay of security.
Because you can the thing most people's default if you're thinking like, well, how do you get some like walkie talkies?
Right?
You know, you get some and those can you know, those have their place and stuff, but they are also not always the most secure options. So being able to encrypt shit is a huge deal, especially when you're talking about like outside of a shit hits the fan kind of deal, which is less likely than you know, some sort of civil unrest protest use case. You know, being able to actually encrypt is huge. Yeah, So I'm a dummy. I don't understand much about setting up my own technology independently,
but I find this interesting. I see the use case. I decide I want to you know, set this up and start, you know, building an emergency mesh network with a half dozen of my friends. Where do I start?
So, first thing is you'll need some hardware that supports LORA. There are a ton of different things out there, ranging from maybe twenty twenty five bucks going all the way up to thousands of dollars, So there's a big range, and that range really depends on the enclosure, what's included in it, the broadcast strength, all that good stuff. So obviously the cheaper you go, the weaker the broadcast strength is.
There might be development boards that are just literally like the PCB, like actual hardware with no case around it.
Yeah.
Yeah, and there's there's some that you can just pick up and immediately use, and so it kind of depends. But that's the first step is finding hardware that can handle LORA, and then you know obviously getting it and then flashing it with the correct software. And that sounds really complicated, but for our purposes of sending text messages without any kind of cellular, LTE or Wi Fi connection, you can use super cheap devices and flashing them is you click a couple buttons and you're done.
So, first off, do you have any kind of specific you know, I know you're working on a text piece that you can put up to explain all this, and I I will certainly share that as soon as it
gets up. But do you have any specific like if somebody's saying, hey, I've got you know, a budget of fifty bucks, you know, or so, is there a complete device you would recommend if they're or somewhere in that median range, like kind of on the lower end, a thing that someone doesn't know how to take, you know, a raw board and craft that into a usable device that you would recommend they purchase. Is to start us off here.
Yeah, definitely. So I kind of have two different options. One is a standalone option that can kind of work by itself, completely independent of anything else, and another one uses your phone, So you'll flash it to the board and then connective or bluetooth to your phone just like a pair of headphones.
Awsot, Oh that's so easy.
Yeah, And so you kind of have options if you want a standalone version. There's a company called Lilygo that makes a thing called a te deck and it's pretty small. It looks like a BlackBerry Clone. Yeah, it has a little mouse thing. Yeah.
It looks like a BlackBerry kind of crossed with a game camera. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's like thicker in the back, it's got that big antenna. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
And so the Lego t Deck is what this is called. It's a BlackBerry Clone. Basically, it has lowra built in, it has Bluetooth, and so all you have to do is get powered to this thing, flash it with mesh tastic and there you go. Now you have a Now you can type out messages, you can send direct messages, you can send encrypted messages, all with one device. That's thirty five dollars.
Oh man, that's great. And this is something you can get like Ali Express was your recommendation, right, yeah, Ali Express.
Probably be the best if you're trying to order a lot. If you want one right now, you can order them on places like Amazon, but it's going to cost you and also fuck Amazon.
So yeah, I mean you are slightly doomed to support one horrible billionaire or another like Kelly expresses. But no, I get it.
Yeah, And I mean one of the upsides to like an all in one thing like this is like I three d printed this case, but you don't have to print a case. You can literally just set this into a shoe box or something and protect it. So there's a lot of options on the cases that you want to use. You could buy pre made cases, or you could just, I don't know, just put something to protect the board back here and then screw on an antenna. You're good.
Yeah, I mean I've seen some shit people do with duct tape. You can figure it out. So my question is, or my other question is, you were talking about a way that you can you can basically do the calming like communications through yoursel phone, right, you can hook that into the next mesh network. Is that something you're able to kind of go over at least in brief or provide people with, you know, here's where they can go to read about how to do that.
Yeah. So the same company, Liligo, makes a smaller little device. It's really small, maybe about inch yeah. Yeah, and it has a screen on it so when you power it on you can actually see the messages come through on the screen on the board itself.
Yeah.
And it connects through Bluetooth to your phone and you use the mesh Tastic app to basically text like you normally would on a phone. Yeah, it looks just like signal pretty much if you're used to that that UI but uh yeah it's super small. Yeah, it's perfect.
And so you're just also using that that mesh Tastic app to flash the software on the devices once you get them. Am I am I understanding that? Right? Yeah? I'm just asking. I'm re asking everything because I want to try to make this accessible for both me when I do it and for our listeners.
Yeah, for sure. So mesh Tastic is the software that's running on these devices, and what Meshastic does is a device that's also running Meshtastic can communicate with each other over LORA long distance. And so you need the hardware that supports the LORAW and a client which is mehtastic that will allow you to send tax messages and stuff like that and do the encryption handle all that stuff. To actually flash these it's super simple. Mesh Tastic has
a link that you can go to. You plug in your device, depending on the version, you hold down a button, you press flash, wait like ten seconds, and boom, now you have a working mesh Tastic node, probably in underneath ten minutes after you get this out of the box. You could be up and running in about ten to fifteen minutes.
That's great and so all right, if I if I've got like say, I'm the guy in my group of friends who has more disposable cash, and I want to get this going. So I pick up five of those lily like boxes three D print a case for them or just wrap them in something, you know, and I keep one. I hand them out to my friends. I get the software on all of them. How how do I get them all kind of in comms together?
Right? Like?
Or if you know, my friends buy them independently and we each flash them and get them up and running. How do we all kind of connect? Like? What is that process?
Like? Yeah? So the good thing with mesh tastic is it automatically handles adding new nodes to the network, and so as soon as a new device that runs mess tastic comes online, it'll broadcast and tell the entire mesh Tastic network nearby, Hey, a new device got added. You can send messages to me. So mesh Tastic has two
different things that it can do. It can do broadcasts, where you're sending out a message to pretty much everyone who has a device that's reachable, and that's good for say, for instance, you know your friend comes online, you can't talk to them directly. You could send them broadcast out and say hey Joe, what device are you and they could reply and broadcast everybody okay, I'm on this device.
You can also do direct messages, so once you know that person's device name, you can actually send messages directly to them. Now keep in mind it's not encrypted because technically it's broadcasting throughout each node. It's just like filtering out the messages for whoever it was addressed for. But yeah, at that point then you could start dming people. And if you want to get started with encryption, it's also
really easy. You can use the mesh Tastic client, so you can install it on your computer, plug it into your computer, and just sett in a encryption key, a passcode, whatever you want to do to secure your communications, and then once that person has that passcode key, whatever, those two devices can connect and talk completely encrypted, either one
on one or if multiple people. Say, for instance, you have an affinity group of like ten people, you all say okay, hey, in an in an emergency, let's meet up at this place and physically share a key or passcode or whatever. Once everybody has that, you can also do encrypted broadcasts to multiple people as well, so getting up and running is super quick. When it comes to flashing, actually communicating with people makes sense, especially on your phone.
It feels just like a normal texting situation.
So that's great.
Yeah, it's really it's really amazing. I mean, this is a really interesting technology because, like I've been interested in radio for a while. But the I guess downside to that is a you can't encrypt any kind of radio communications in the US b a license. Yeah, unless if you're the cops of the military or the FEDS, you cannot encrypt shit, and if you do, it's it's kind of an issue. But yeah, you can't encrypt messages on
regular radios. Another thing is like usability. If you hand somebody like a bow thaying handheld radio, most people are not going to know what to do with it at all.
They're gonna be like, what the fuck is this? But if I hand you a BlackBerry clon and say just type, and if you want to send a DM to somebody to find them and just send it like it's it's really easy for your average person to pick it up and use it, which is honestly the best kind of situation, especially in an emergency where you can't really rely on highly technical people all the time, because what if everybody
in your affinity group isn't super technical, you know. So it's a it's a good common device that anybody can pick up and start sending messages, even encrypted messages, pretty easily.
So I think that covers the technical basics of what you need to do. I did want to ask real quick before we get onto some of the more ideological you know stuff here conversations about like why you specifically gotten into this and why like this is important for people. I wanted to ask just really quickly in terms of that three D printed case. Did you just go search in some repository and find when someone had made or is there one that you've put up somewhere that you might recommend to people?
Yeah? Actually it was recently uploaded to thing thing everse, which is a website that has free three D print plans and files, And so I just searched up lilygo t deck on thing everse and the full case, I mean the back Yeah, I loves great has Yeah, it looks like an actual device.
Yeah, and I'm assuming that one's just pla Yeah, just type of classic, super basic Yeah, yeah, looks great.
Yeah, and this only took all these pieces snapped together, so no glue required, and all these pieces took roughly about eight hours to print at one hundred percent density. So you have a pretty solid case with plans that are available online and in eight hours you can have a literal professional looking device that's protected and able to go, you know, in adverse situations.
Yeah. So now I want to get into some of the more kind of like just talking about First off, what got you into this, Like when did you decide this is a skill I want to develop and a thing I want to figure out?
Yeah. I mean, so for my day job, I'm an offensive security consultant, which is just a fancy way of saying that.
It's a cool job, pat living. Yeah, you're doing like Red Team stuff. It sounds like, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I've always been interested in technology and specifically like how do you make technology work in the benefit of people as opposed to working the benefit for profits or corporate interest or state interests. So I think technology is a really good tool when used correctly and there's a lot of moral and social and political implications when when
it comes to technology and actually making it. But that's kind of how I got into it, was kind of combining my interest in computers and hacking combined with kind of the social and political activism I've been a part of. So that was kind of my entry point into it.
Yeah, that makes that makes sense because I do think, like when I think about what inspired me about the early Internet, about like file sharing back in the late nineties, about you know, when Wikipedia first started up and stuff
all that stuff like that. We talk a lot about like the days when we thought the Internet was going to be an unqualified boon for human liberty, the ability to create effectively, like a smaller and more limited private Internet for like you and your people to communicate safely through definitely like scratches that itch. And when we say like more limited Internet, you're not through one of these
networks we're talking about. You're not going to be like sending YouTube videos and shit, right, But that's not what it's for.
You know.
It's got its own use and it's very much kind of what the Internet was about at the beginning, which is just allowing people to connect that otherwise wouldn't be able to or wouldn't be able to as securely.
Yeah, exactly, And actually the same protocol LORA, you actually kind of can run a basic Internet protocol that it's called Laura WAN Laura Wide Access Networking, and you can run some pretty basic programs on it outside of just text based stuff. So it's a really interesting kind of
rabbit hole to go down into. I will say, if you start looking at Laura and mestastic stuff, you will eventually start to run into like a right leaning, yes, sometimes straight out fascist people because there's a crossover between you know, the uh, the gun community and kind of off grid prepper doomsday prepper people, you know, so you'll run into that.
Anyone who doesn't like like the government is going to have a vested interest in being able to communicate in a way that can't be easily intercepted, right like that, And that doesn't always mean your buddies. I think most people are pretty familiar with that.
Exactly. Yea, but yeah, it's it's it's really useful. There there are other ways to say, for instance, make your own kind of like micro internet. I read an article that talked about making kind of like a DIY internet in quotes, where you can basically take your home router and connect say, for instance, your neighbors to the same network, and then if you have a server of your own that has books, that has maps, that has music and information,
you can easily share that with other people. And so there are other ways to kind of get your own off grid quote unquote internet together, but just outside of text.
But yeah, it's definitely possible. It's just needs a little bit more technical know how, but hopefully soon it'll be a little simpler to where you can just download something, get you a book server up and running, and then have anybody come along and download books about you know, permaculture or about you know, emergency medical aid or fixing infrastructure and stuff like that.
So yeah, that's huge being able to actually like transmit text and stuff through that too. So yeah, you said when we were chatting online kind of before we hooked this up, you said something along the lines of you had a bit of a tangent you wanted to go on. So I've asked kind of my questions here if there is anything else you wanted to get out or express or say, just kind of on the subject of people taking more autonomy for themselves in their communications technology. Well, now's the time.
Yeah, sounds good. I mean so earlier you asked, like, what kind of got me into this? Yeah, But there's another situation that happened because I live in Texas, Oh and a couple Yeah, so you know where I'm going with this. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. A couple of years ago, there was a really bad winter storm. And for most people listening, you might be in the northeast, like, who cares?
Yeah, I was there for that storm.
Oh it was it was crazy. It was crazy. Yeah. And so for people outside of Texas, you might be saying, Okay, well, winter storm whatever, like, how could that affect anything? But Texas's power grid is privately owned. Yeah, it's completely separate from the rest of us. Yeah. Urkat is a private
company that runs the Texas power grid. And so we had a winter storm event happen, and our power systems are not in any way built for extreme cold, and so we had the situation where pretty much the entire state was out of power, except for maybe a few areas in certain cities that had, you know, a specific environment where they had backup generators and stuff like that. But millions of people lost power. And when people lose power, it isn't just oh I can't like watch TV or
like do anything. There's lies that are lost, you know, directly from people who require ventilators to live to people who need electricity to run their medical devices. That impacted everything, right, So the power going out impacted transportation, impacted water, it
impacted sanitation. So all these bits of infrastructure are all connected, and communications is kind of at the core of our modern day infrastructure, right, because in order to run a power plant, you need to have power, but not only that, you need to be able to communicate with other places in order to properly run the water sanitation, you know, program same with transfera I mean, if communication goes out, you literally can't deliver food, You literally can't deliver water
to people and places that need it. And so it's not just an impact directly to communications, but an impact to your entire life. And so when we're talking about these pieces of infrastructure, we really have to think about the larger picture of how all this infrastructure is integrated in our lives and how an impact to one part of it can impact your life in ways that you never even thought of.
Yeah, yeah, and that's also I mean, I think I would imagine one of the benefits I can say, just from sort of the fairly minimal degree to which I've done stuff like understand the basics of solar power and what I can do and can't do in my area with it, you know, even outside of the stuff that is green and renewable, understanding like how you can and cannot use generators in an out emergency, and like which work.
It's just given me more of an understanding of how the regular stuff that I use day to day works a little bit better about what the real power draw of my life is, you know, and anytime you're kind of expanding your autonomy technologically, it also just increases the degree to which you understand what's going on every day, which I think is always of value, right, Like, even outside of whatever theoreticals we might prompt for like what could happen or what is likely to happen, because we're
all going to deal with more disasters in our lives before they're over, hopefully more than one. The alternative is worse. But yeah, well that's kind of all I had to say. Did you have anything else you wanted to get into before we roll out.
Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of use cases outside of like whether events or natural disasters to protests is one of them. A really big security concern when you're at a protest is bringing your cell phone. Not a lot of people know that your cell phone has a unique identifier number, and police governments states all have technology to basically like bring up a fake cell phone tower and have your device connect to it, so there are ways to track say, for instance, you go to
a protest, you have your phone on. Now your identifier is kind of tied to being at this protest, right, But with technology like this, it kind of circumvents that, especially when it comes to the ability for a threat actor to track you or know that you've been there. And it's encrypted, so even if say, for instance, a police department was able to intercept low raw, they wouldn't be able to read the messages period. And so that's
another good thing. Same with you know, conflict zones. Yeah, you know, we're seeing now with the genocide that's happening in Palas in the Palestinians, it's increasingly harder for people to communicate what areas are safe it's hard to communicate, you know, oh, we need to get out now, have an early warning system of there are literal tanks coming
down the highway towards us, we need to leave. And so something like this can also be you know, really good in that situation because again the messages are encrypted, it can go pretty long range, especially if you have direct line of site. We're talking like up to ten miles, and so being able to just send a text message to somebody can save someone's life in a situation like that. So there's a lot of different use cases outside of you know, emergencies that this stuff can be used. But
that's where building the autonomy kind of comes from. And if we're talking about like leftist political organizing and talking about building a better future, being autonomous from stay in corporate control. Infrastructure is really important, right because if say, for instance, hypothetically we had the big r Revolution, right, right, the first thing that people in power are going to go after is power, water, sanitation, and communications. Right, They're
going to go after the main infrastructure. And so if we want to have an autonomous and free future, we have to think about collectively owning the means of infrastructure, not just to means of production. Yeah.
Well, and even outside you know, the big R scenario, something that I think is probably at least certainly more immediate is continuing sort of downs in social order and areas expanding where non state actors, including the aforementioned Nazis that we had talked about, are able to get bolder, right, And like, one thing we've seen right now, if you watch videos of cartel operations in parts of Mexico right now, one thing you will see on their really good guys,
right on their special ops style teams, is they will all have these weird looking things, look kind of like a microphone attached to their plate carriers, and that's a cell jammer. It's the standard thing for them to carry into the field because it stops people from reporting in real time when they're carrying out an operation. And cartels are not the only people who do that, right, Like, it is a widely used tactic now. You see it
all over in Ukraine. Right it's in part not just because of like cell phones, but because of like shit like drones and stuff. It's just an increasingly common thing. And so when you're talking about what our threats that are realistic, well, it's not just the state that can interrupt your ability to communicate traditionally, right, it's also your
non state opponents. And so for a variety of reasons, having backups, having alternates is just an incredibly important thing to be able to do to some extent, Yeah, definitely, Yeah, Well anything else.
No, I mean, right now, I'm working on a kind of step by step article that kind of goes into more detail on what you need to do this, all the equipment you need, how to actually flash devices, how to start sending messages, and so once that's ready, I'll publish it. I publish you know, diy articles and stuff to my substack. It's an Archo solar Punk or you can go to hydroponictrash dot solar and I have a link there that goes to substack as well.
Beautiful. Well, all right, Hydroponic Trash, thank you so much for everything. This has really been useful and enlightening. I'm going to go hop on to Ali Express in a second here and make a couple of purchases, and I'm sure there's going to be a number of folks doing a version of that.
Again.
You can find our guests at Hydroponic trash on Twitter, where you can get in touch with them and keep an eye on what they're writing their substack. Very very excited to play around with this technology. Thank you so much for working to make it more visible.
Yeah, of course, thanks for having me on.
Yes, absolutely, it could.
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