Public communication can facilitate low-risk coordination under surveillance.

ABSTRACT: Consider a sub-population of rebels aiming at initiating a revolution. To avoid initializing a failed revolution, rebels would first strive to estimate their "power", which is often correlated with their number. However, especially in non-democratic countries, rebels avoid disclosing themselves. This poses a significant challenge for rebels: estimating their number while minimizing the risk of being identified as rebels. This paper introduces a distributed computing framework to study this question. Our main insight is that the communication pattern plays a crucial role in achieving such a task. Specifically, we distinguish between public communication, in which each message announced by an individual can be viewed by all its neighbors, and private communication, in which each message is r

SUBMITTER: Korman A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8891294 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature