Getting internet to a protest

Question

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but it's been in the back of my head for a while.

I am in Turkey, where there are thousands of protestors gathering in the street against the government. There have been reports that the internet has been cut off in the center of my medium sized city. I don't plan to do this, but I'm wondering how you could deliver internet securely, with as little danger to you as possible, with the cheapest/least amount of hardware to a 600 meter long street or a 40,000 square meter park.

There could potentially be thousands of people using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the outside world.

I imagine the set up would include a series of high bandwidth wireless relays hooked up to a TOR node outside of the city center, but I lack the expertise to know whether this would work.

Answer 1

whether this would work

Depends on what you make of this; you could get it to work, but how well?

... 600 meter long street or a 40,000 square meter park ... a TOR node ... thousands of people ...

Passing all data over a single point will cause some bandwidth problems, you'll probably need more.

how you could deliver

There are multiple ways; you could reuse existing infrastructure which is proven to work, although you'll have to breach the ISPs equipment or get an agreement with them. Failing that, some form of cable / radio communication has to be introduced that would be sufficient for social media traffic.

Then, the question is how you will make the networks and how you will interconnect them. How many hosts per network? How many networks per street? How will you connect the networks? Where will you place the necessary servers (DHCP, ...)? Where are your points of failure? Which streets will use more bandwidth than others? If one street starts mass reporting, will the network die? ..?

There's a lot of thought that can be put into this.