On 10/17/05, Theodore Hong <n+twh25 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote: > We were just discussing this topic last week at the anonymous > communication workshop in Dagstuhl. The main consensus seemed to > be that Freenet can't do anything for people in truly draconian > regimes (for example, where the state is willing to just turn off the > Internet and confiscate all computers). > > However, in countries that are interested in economic development, > Freenet can serve to make the government's choices harder. If the > existence of Freenet forces them to clamp down on computer technology, > they will lose some of its economic benefits and (perhaps) provoke > additional unrest. That's a kind of victory too.
I agree; and in the past year I have tried to figure out how to increase that price of control. Yet I have only succeeded in convincing myself time and time again that it will, in fact, come cheap. For example, imagine that residential Internet connections were locked behind a web proxy. When someone views a web page, the proxy uploads the page's data to a database and sends a (user, timestamp, uri, page-hash) record to the police. The police then run algorithms over these records to sniff out unusual or forbidden activity. It is clear to me that this system would be practically impossible to circumvent on any large scale. Yet its upfront cost is modest by the standards of a state, and its opportunity cost is negligible because it does not interfere with business. I therefore see the creation of just such a system as a likely outcome. It will then be to us as though the Internet had never been invented. And if we are clever enough to find a practical alternative to the Internet in computer media or local wireless interaction---and I doubt that it will ever really be practical, though I have tried hard to make it so---we will witness the power of state regulators to lock down not only networking but also, if need be, hardware and software themselves. These are the thoughts that have led me to abandon (at least tentatively in the absence of compelling criticism) my effort to design a Freenet capable of taking root under a tyranny.
