Range isn't the only factor, though. Noise tolerance is another significant one, and if mesh networks take off, I think a lot of long distance radios and other devices will struggle in dense locations. Imagine tens of thousands of overlapping devices with no real capacity to coordinate resource sharing so they're all just shouting over each other.

So that a few 100 people can spam test on the public channel and forget about it.

If you want to know how to really function in a surveillance state look at the Russian underground networks: irc over (insert proxy method here)

That could be made illegal as well if the FCC felt inclined to. Radio direction finding would make tracking down mesh nodes fairly trivial for them.

With access to what exactly? Unless everything is stored locally, that accomplishes exactly nothing.