SocialMesh: Can networks of meshed smartphones ensure public access to twitter during an attack?

We explore whether public data networks called SocialMesh - formed automatically from smartphone radio-routers and adapting to changing RF propagation and interference without relying on managed cellular infrastructure - can also be designed to overcome any and all countermeasures mounted by an attacker and reliably support social applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. We rigorously examine the architecture, techniques and algorithms that make decentralized or "ad-hoc," ultrawideband networks work in the presence of hostile jamming or protocol attacks. We illustrate the RF link-budget using 3-d graphs to show how interference affects the network performance as these networks become heavily utilized or jammed. Using low-cost hardware, self-organizing routing software, and uncoordinated/distributed CDMA we show how they can retain adequate system capacity even under heavy load from users or interference from jammers. Open standardization and field trials of SocialMesh networks will further clarify SocialMesh security and performance by opening up the design specifications to international review. Open-source design specifications for SocialMesh will be updated at http://www.socialmesh.org.