Hola,
I've been lurking on this list for months. Regrettably I have not been
able to contribute much to the source base due to my efforts to finish
school (done in a week!), and after which time I will be retiring from the
world at large for about a year.
However, it's clear to me (and many others) that Freenet is likely the
singularly most interesting and powerful piece of software currently in
development. So powerful, in fact, that I doubt that by the time the
platform becomes quite feature-comprehensive, easy-to-use, and popular
(I'd give ~1-2 years for 5 million nodes?) that the governments of the
world are going to do all they can to stop it, legally and technically.
Therefore, it seems to be prudent for someone to give a legal analysis as
to the probability that Freenet could be outlawed. Beyond that (and I am
sure that this has at least been somewhat discussed), if it is, in a
given region, illegal to run a Freenet node, are there mechanisms in the
network to participate quietly, using masking and other steganographic
techniques?
Because if Freenet truly delivers what we all think it can, there will be
nothing that the governments (and corporations!) of the world would like
better than to shut it down, even perhaps going so far as forcing the
U.N. to pass a resolution that could strongarm any nation on earth into
actively legally engaging any and all Freenet nodes. I think it would be
wise of the team to plan for the worst (i.e., expect this to happen) and
consider how existence could carry on even in that most stringent
environment.
If Freenet is carrying too much traffic (movies, MP3s, Quake III, etc.),
then it would seem to me quite easy to spot a Freenet node, even if one
was using an HTTPs / SSH pseudo-tunnel to mask the actual content and
mechanism. The sheer quantity of traffic would give it away. So (and this
may seem terribly heretical) wouldn't it seem wise to restrict Freenet to
textual documents only? I'm preparing to be flamed for this, but please,
hear me out for a second:
Free speech has been best expressed in text. It's unlikely for this to
change.
Freenet, as a tool for free speech, is best implemented as a textual
redistribution tool. Assisting the redistribution of audio and video not
only confounds steganographic techniques, makes participation more costly,
and makes the network orders of magnitude less scalable, but the
intellectual quality of the content would likely greatly decrease.
If Freenet were solely redistributing textual data, its capacity to argue,
legally, that it is a tool for assisting the anonymous discussion of
ideas, it would be more likely to gain specific legal protection and would
make it more politically difficult for an all-out ban of the network to
occur.
Having posed this thought, this consideration of having an all-text
Freenet, I realize that most of you won't buy it and are driving at the
liberation of all information, etc. You'll be pretty bothered at my
suggestion; after all, YOU have been coding it for the last months. But at
least consider this: it would be useful to allow individual nodes the
right to choose to participate solely in the redistribution of textual
content; this would allow them to participate (consuming, producing, and
redistributing) in Freenet with a low-bandwidth link and
surreptitiously. Much more cunning devices could be employed to mask a
node's Freenet membership.
Separately, I have some opinions about trust networks, but I probably will
wait a year to open my mouth more. ;)
Yours,
-david weekly
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