There need to be strategies to maintain health in the face of occupation, food shortages, curfews, harassment and other contingencies. As well as physical health, psychological well-being is crucial. It is also useful to be able to determine whether torture has been used, and to authoritatively show this to a wide audience. Demonstrating the violence of the aggressor is an enormously powerful tool. Communications One of the first things commonly done in a coup d'etat is to occupy radio and television stations.
Communications are crucial to legitimacy in modern society.
If social defence is to work, it must both have effective communications systems of its own and be able to disrupt the communications of the aggressor. The radio played a vital part in the resistance in Czechoslovakia in 1968. It is crucial to maintain communications with people in other countries. In the latter case, supporters of the pro-democracy movement in China maintained overseas communications through fax machines and computer networks. Some relevant systems already exist but are not widely available or known.