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WASHINGTON—Alarmed at the prospect of unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration, millions of fearful Americans have already begun stockpiling facts before the federal government comes to take them away, sources confirmed Friday. “I know my rights as an American, so you’d better believe I’m getting my hands on as many facts as possible and keeping them somewhere safe where this First Amendment–hating president of ours can’t snatch them all up,” said Pittsburgh resident David Edelman, 38, adding that he was worried that President Trump planned to not only suspend production of facts, but also seize existing ones, leaving Americans and their families completely defenseless. “The minute I saw Trump, I knew he was someone who didn’t grow up around facts or the kind of folks who use facts. Well, the founding fathers cherished my right to possess facts, and they’d be rolling in their graves if they knew the Feds were going to bust in and try to steal our facts in the middle of the night.” A spokesperson for the Trump administration dismissed such fears, saying that the president merely wanted to keep facts away from certain dangerous people.
I appreciate the words, however I’m an US citizen in the US, most of us (including myself) would be fucked without internet for even a month. Not to mention it being harder to organize resistance, which is why radio is important.
I’ve also worked in large data centers many years ago. There’s really not too many internet providers in America, and it wouldn’t be hard for a couple of agents to be sent to each backbone data center and just pull the 10 gig fibers out of the ports and then close the building.
If the US regime wanted to keep internet for themselves (military and partners) they can do that easily with Nazilink (starlink). Or just use radio.
I don’t think the economy is high on the regimes list of things to worry about as evident by (gestures around) the current state of the us economy. If anything, they might crash the economy so they don’t have to pay off any debt and then switch off of USD and make all the USA use maga crypto.
I do agree with you. I know a fair number of HAMs who continue to network with other radio operators. They are always on standby in the event of a major communications breakdown for public service reasons, and have warehouses of parts and tools in their sheds/homes to repair their radio hardware, as well as hand-powered generation equipment. Mad respect to those people. I’ve sat down with them for a few hours and have enjoyed listening to their projects.
I also used to work for a Data Center. I hear you there with limited Transit providers. There used to be many more in the past, although consolidation has occurred, and continues to occur. I know SprintLink is under T-Mobile, Level3 is now under CenturyLink/Lumen/whatever you want to call them. Smaller, regional providers I used to use like FiberTech Networks are now under Crown Castle, and Crown Castle is now in the process of merging with Zayo. Providers like XO Communications and UUNet are all under Verizon now. Charter/Spectrum is in the middle of merging with Cox. Frontier is merging with Verizon. Windstream is Windstream… The list goes on, and on, and on. Even though the Data Center I worked at bought as much bandwidth as we could from every major transit provider that is in our local POP, the POP/IX sites, as you mention, are the biggest risk, and that is where targeting will occur.
The Military already has their own private communication network. They don’t have to do anything. But if they want to seize Starlink, then yeah, that’s the absolute worst case and countries are already exploring ways to avoid that doomsday situation for them. SpaceX already needs to deal with the government for their launches and Orbit coordination.
As for Cryptocurrency, that brings us back to the general issue at hand with Crypto (and subsequent memecoins). If MAGACrypto were to become the de-facto currency for US, will anyone else accept it for trade? USD is only as powerful as it is because it is the global trade standard. Cutting off the US from trade by severing communications networks will completely devalue the USD. Crypto isn’t going to function without a communications network. If you have to convert from MAGACrypto to USD just to do trade, then MAGACrypto is worthless. I hope no administration in the US, is dumb enough to actually do that. Even if the current Admin and a few past admins have put in the work to make something like that possible. The US, after all, created the technology to do that to begin with.