Why Hong Kong Protesters are Using Firechat for Peer-to-Peer Communications on Their Mobiles

Censorship of communications between people living under authoritarian rule has always been a problem.  With the advent of the internet and its various forms of communication these governments have worked twice as hard to control the message. Yet, with tools like Instagram, twitter and proxy servers people have found ways to inform the world in real time.  

China's Communist government is the most notorious of these regimes with its Great Firewall and a whole "literally" army  of internet censors people still find workarounds. 

Protesters in Hong Kong have discovered a new yet older method to avoid China's censorship army direct communications with there various mobile devices using an application FireChat which works on the same principle as old radio sets.

But one app in particular is getting more attention than usual: FireChat.

The messaging app created by Open Garden can send and receive messages without an internet connection. It uses peer-to-peer Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct connections to link to other nearby FireChat-enabled devices. If you get enough of those devices in the same area, the result is a massive mesh network in which every handset can message every other handset in daisy-chain fashion – without ever sending a packet over an internet router.

 On Sunday afternoon in Hong Kong (around 11 PM PT on Saturday), Open Garden started seeing a lot more FireChat activity in region. More than 100,000 new users downloaded the iOS or Androidapp and signed up for an account, and FireChat jumped to the most-downloaded slot in the iTunes App Store.

 As for how much off-grid messaging FireChat is generating in Hong Kong, Open Garden simply doesn’t know. Since those sessions take place directly between devices in a crowdsourced mesh network, the messages never hit Open Garden’s servers. Open Garden is just as blind as the Chinese government to those communications, Daligault said.