One Ping and One Ping Only: The Trouble With Meshtastic and ATAK-style Networks, by GuerrillaLogistician
TLDR; Don’t fall for the fucking hype… please for the love of god, I can’t tell if these people are more committed than Jim Jones fanatics at Jonestown.
I usually don’t want to wade into this conversation because other people are far more competent and do better with this subject, but I can’t help it. If you are married to a concept in totality, you will end up dead because you haven’t reasoned things out. Like anything else, there isn’t a perfect answer; there is always a use case, and technology will continually advance, but the core science won’t change as quickly. Let’s begin breaking this topic down. Then, @4nt1p4tt3rn on X can break this down even better and give you the details/secret tricks that will scare you for now I hope to induce cold sweats I will leave the night terrors for him to divulge
This is an analogy to help those understand, not a one-for-one, so if you are a nerd of all things Meshtastic, add your “actually” comments below so you can be mocked accordingly. For the rest of you, especially those who liked Hunt for Red October, you may understand the analogy. I am sure many of you have seen this Shawn Conery’s MEME, but let’s watch it again.
Captain Ramius: Re-verify our range to target… one ping only.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Captain, I – I – I just…
Captain Ramius: Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Aye, Captain.
A ping is a massive active sonar pulse that can actually kill divers and wildlife if close enough. Unlike the Ping on a sonar system, Meshtastic, LORA, and similar systems tend to run low power, which is helpful, but we will dive into that in a minute. Let’s say a sonarman could put out a low-power ping (Active Sonar) that did its job; that wouldn’t be a bad thing if it were usable and quiet enough that other ships wouldn’t detect it easily. I won’t speculate on how advanced active sonar is these days, and if they can do that, but let’s pretend they can. Except the sonarman accidentally hits the continuous button instead of one ping, and now the submarine is just calmly tracking and transmitting its very unique low-power pulse at intervals. Now, let’s say dozens of subs are running around along with a sonar network called SOSUS all quietly running active sonar. If you watched Hunt for Red October, you would briefly remember the whole Russian Navy out searching for Red October. All those ships were banging away with active sonar, and Captain Ramius easily avoided them with little effort. Think of all that noise in the water and how easy it was for the Americans to figure out what was happening.
The interesting thing is, though, that all these active sonar emissions have a fingerprint, just like Meshtastic does. It looks different and acts differently than other systems, so it is definable on a TinySA Ultra or by listening to it. Add to that, just like most digital systems; there is also this unique fingerprint that gets transmitted initially, saying I am node 123. Just think all those submarines quietly pushing out an IDs but one keeps saying I am 123 which with time might mean it’s the USS Razorback. Just think, if that sub could not only be tracked, but the enemy knew where it was, when it was moving, and could tell it apart from all the others with minimal effort. This is Meshtastic in its basic unhacked over-the-counter form being sold by people on YouTube. Can things be dialed back? Sure. Can some or maybe all the data be hidden? I doubt it, but let’s pretend it can be. Will the system still have to retransmit each time someone calls out? Yes, that is its design. So even if we dial it back, even if we hide the info, we still can count the systems operating and locate them faster then if it only transmitted occasionally, and the rest of the time it was just listening doing its job.
How long would it take to setup a remotely secure network for someone untrained in Meshtastic? Are you very tech-savvy or only slightly? In less than a day, I can train you to transmit with a wifi only tablet and a Baofeng, sending out short burst encrypted messages. If pressed for time I can teach you how to do it safely in a few hours thanks to NCScout training the trainer style of teaching. https://brushbeater.store/collections/training-courses Can someone teach me Meshtastic in that short of time, then set up a system in short notice and prevent others from easily gathering vital data on my friends, family, confidants? If so I would like to see that class.
Today’s modern resources can give us many gifts; they connect rural areas and can create accessible, non-cellular networks to communicate with. This is great until you realize that this free distributed network is neither controlled nor owned by you, just like cell phones. Anyone in this field of study should know by now what is wrong with cell phones, but if you need a deadly example, we only need to look at Ukraine, and the multiple time’s Westerners went to Ukraine with systems like ATAK and got smoked just inside the border. I will reference one link for proof, but there is far more for you to find if you search the subject. Suffice it to say it’s a very rarely talked about subject because ATAK was a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and Raytheon-funded project. If you trust either of them, well, I have some excellent Ukrainian oil stocks to sell you, and I promise the Bidens aren’t involved. Next, and sadly, the worst part is just trusting your cellphone to operate any software. It is dangerous enough having a WIFI only tablet, downloading APK files then transferring them from one source to another. While safe now depending on where you got the APK, and who wrote it the risk is still there.
Again, I don’t care if it is Apple or Android remember that we have court cases where the gov had all the information, they just weren’t legally allowed to use it in court against the defendant because of how they obtained the information. There are things more advanced than Stingray system that can get you scooped up quickly. Just remember if it is being sold in China and connects to a cell tower, it has a backdoor. Unless you are savvy enough to cut the cell system out of a device, expect it is always talking even if you didn’t pay for service. So, to recap, if you are building a very UNSAFE open network for people to use for a peacetime operation, Meshtastic is fine. Now, let’s dive into why you shouldn’t waste your time on this if you are remotely prepping or worried about anything beyond lousy weather.
