In the past day or two an interesting piece of news has been making the rounds. Earlier this year the police department of the city of Seattle, Washington set up its own wireless mesh network for what many people are saying is for the purpose of keeping people under surveillance. The hardware was purchased from Aruba Networks; it is unknown whether or not the company set up the gear, or if another outfit was contracted for installation and maintenance. Each of the nodes is apparently broadcasting frames containing ESSIDs that reflect its location (such as 4th Avenue and Union Street …

A couple of weeks ago the crowd over at Reddit started putting together a project that's been referred to online as /r/darknetplan, an effort to build a completely decentralized, encrypted wireless mesh network that is censorship-resistent and anonymized. They kick around a lot of ideas in their discussion threads (mostly links to other articles, with discussion of each on-site) and the project's IRC server is packed with interested people. Now, I'm not one to slam anyone who wants to give such a project a shot but they came under some scrutiny from a blogger whose opinion is that it's …