> Because of the ignorance of the police you need to be nuts to run a Tor exit node.

You'd be nuts to do that because 90% of the traffic going through your node will warrant legit police interest.

So are you saying that 90% of the people who want privacy want it for illegal reasons? Then you won't mind if I read all your email?

That's what I thought.

> That's what I thought.

You thought that privacy requires anonymity. It doesn't.

I think unsecured WIFI AP in Burma or China is a very precious commodity, if it even exists.

China has some open WIFI services (I deployed some FON routers in South China.) I have also been to Burma last year, and the biggest risk there is not technological censorship but human snitches. Burma is a massive country, some parts of which are controlled by the opposition groups, but in government strong-holds, you probably wouldn't find wifi, much less an unsecured one.

In any case, do not use someone's network to do something that might get them killed.

Then you think very wrong. It's trivial to find open WIFI all over China. Most restaurants and coffee shops have it.

I can see several from my apartment.

But, of course, the problem is that even with an open wifi there are quite a few websites that are blocked by the great firewall...

So using an open wifi doesn't solve the problem the way tor does. The other way is to have a server outside of china and use ssh to proxy through it but how many have a server they can access like that...

Anyone that cares can access the Internet at large in China. There's many http proxies that work quite fine. Most expats that care use a VPN tunnel to a service or corporate HQ. The rare person uses Tor but it's generally disfavored because it's unreliable and slow.

This is not the problem however. The vast majority of Chinese people in general don't really care about censorship. Far more due to language and culture than censorship the Internet is mostly an internal Chinese thing to Chinese for the purposes of entertainment, not information. Many view state censorship as doing its job to protect the majority from corrupt western influences.

But it seems most people in the west would like to prefer to imagine jackbooted thugs keeping the masses down through coercion and fear. The truth is rather worse, that of apathy, ignorance and a collectivist submission to authority.

Better yet, a botnet of 3G smartphones. This might be useful enough that some criminal organization might actually buy smartphones in bulk to do this, instead of trying to hack them. (Maybe even manufacture them? These things wouldn't even need input devices and displays.) Pay truckers or bus drivers to carry them around in cities, and program the nodes to periodically shut themselves off. Combine this with a mechanism like TOR, and I'm not sure how you're going to prosecute. (Are judges going to issue warrants based on MAC address?)

Your idea is devilishly cool! I am not qualified to assess whether / how it could be implemented, but I wonder if it would be cost-efficient. Smartphones are not that cheap. A criminal organization would need some serious financial incentives to deploy such a network. In any case, it sounds really neat: an entirely distributed and decentralized. Such a system can't be brought down with a warrant. It can't be beheaded.

Can you get prepaid internet access though? Otherwise, each phone has to be linked to a social security number (at least in the US), which seems like it would put a damper on the whole thing.

Yes, you can even get prepaid data time for iPhones.