Thanks for the comments, and for the pointers to Eternity and Briar.
It would appear that I have rather a lot of reading to do. ;-)
One more generic comment/observation: clearly, Usenet or a Usenet-ish
mechanism will run on a smartphone. But I'm not sure that's a good
idea. Given the existence of things like CarrierIQ, the propensity of
repressive governments to strongarm (or take over) telcos, the geolocation
capabilities of cellular providers, the extant research on re-identifying
putatively de-identified data, the epidemic of smartphone malware (including
in "app marketplaces"), etc., I've kinda arrived at the point where
I think "no smartphones" is sound advice.
I don't like this: it's inconvenient and annoying. But I think -- if
we didn't know before now -- the last couple of weeks have shown us
that every government that *can* track, log, record smartphone use
is falling all over itself to do exactly that. And whatever they're
doing today, however pervasive it is: tomorrow it will be more. This
not only presents an obvious problem ("government A has the info")
but it presents a secondary problem ("government B gets a feed of
data from government A") and a tertiary problem ("government C has
hacked government B and they're getting a feed too").
---rsk
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