Now, I'll admit I haven't been following Freenet 0.7's development very closely, and I'd imagine the issue has been brought up before, but...
It seems that the argument for a darknet is that somebody watching your traffic won't see you communicating with "known Freenet nodes," thereby making it harder to know if you're running a node. However, the effectiveness of this approach would seem to be mitigated by the fact that an observer who can tell if you are communicating with a "known Freenet node" will also be able to see that you are sending and receiving a relatively large amount of encrypted UDP traffic, which would tell them "something" is going on. If you were in a situation where simply running a Freenet node was something you wanted to hide, that "something" would be almost as bad. Now, let's get to the problem darknets and their "trusted peers" introduce. For this, I will use a more specific example. Let's say there is a group of Chinese citizens that are using Freenet to discuss democracy. Now, let's say one of the members of the group gets caught passing out pro-democracy leaflets. The authorities will then take the member's computer and determine, through Frost list subscriptions, browser cache, etc. that the member was using Freenet to discuss Democracy. (Remember, this would be one of the less cautious members, so the the previously mentioned things might not be securely encrypted/deleted.) The member's Freenet node would then be monitored, and because any communications with it are going to be from peers the member specifically added, the authorities could reasonably assume most neighboring nodes use Freenet for the same purpose. So, it seems to me that a darknet based Freenet is only marginally effective at solving one problem and creates a new, larger problem. One of the benefits to anonymity of an opennet approach is that a connection between nodes does not imply a relationship between the nodes' operators. I'm sure darknets have their uses, but an opennet seems to be more in line with Freenet's objectives.
