Published May 03, 2000
Guaranteed anonymous free speech on the Internet? Yes, a new project being tested now distributes information, protects privacy, increases efficiency, and blocks censorship.
Who would be opposed to privacy, security, and anonymity on the Internet? Yet, current forces are attempting to remodel the WWW as corporate-controlled via both code and law. An example was last week’s info.net profile of Predictive Networks’ selling information of your online activities and habits.
The World Wide Web stores and sends copies of files at central servers (computers online full time). Freenet files float through the Internet, uncentralized.
Ian Clarke advanced his concept for a “Distributed Decentralized Information Storage and Retrieval System” while at Edinburgh University. His objective has been to distribute files over many computers on the Internet, not just at a central repository. The slashdot effect, whereby a server slows or fails due to massive traffic, is impossible with Freenet.
Without central control and administration—a return to the original idea of the first long distance network, ARPAnet—Clarke’s concept testing is drawing more praise than criticism. He admits that it will never replace the WWW. Whatever happens, he is sure that “the privacy movement is inevitable.”
Any file on Freenet can be stored anywhere, cached and distributed on demand from anywhere else. Individual documents cannot be traced to their source or even where physically stored. This protocol ,at some functions, is more efficient than the Web and certainly safer.
Participation in this system involves using their free software (as server, client or both) to submit and retrieve information from the system. The source-code (that most commercial companies hold secret) is openly distributed so developers are free to modify or improve it.
Malicious Denial of Service attacks are inconsequential, and attempts to remove a piece of information from Freenet is virtually impossible. Computers everywhere store the files and the keys to link to those files.
Authors of information stored on this system are automatically anonymous, and so are the readers, unless either choose to identify themselves. Anyone can publish without a permanent online Internet connection or their own domain name. This resilience and lack of central control is worrying the authorities.
Freedom for the law-abiding does consequentially grant the same freedom to the law-breakers. To restrict everyone’s freedoms in the name of crime-control is to run parallel to oppressive third-world governments; the result would be less freedom for everyone. American Jurisprudence follows the constraint that for the guilty to go unpunished is better than to allow the innocent to be convicted. Those are our society’s choices.
Ian Clarke addresses these challenges eloquently:
“At the moment, it is trivially easy for a government to read every email sent by a person. The potential for automated monitoring is huge. For an outlay of a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and by passing some obscure law, the most intimate and private details about you can be obtained easily.
“Freenet won’t encourage or enable criminal behavior that wouldn’t have happened without it. Freenet implements free speech, nothing more. It is our hope that people under oppressive governments can use Freenet to describe their plight without retribution.
“It is sometimes impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously, since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent against people stating their opinions. It is my hope that systems like Freenet will encourage people to make judgments about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying upon a corruptible centralized source.
“A document on Freenet is like an anonymous letter to the New York Times; it is a letter that could be published. Remember that Ted Kaczynski was identified as the Unabomber only after he anonymously published his manifesto.
“Anonymous sharing is perceived as a threat to traditional publishing and recording industries, much like radio, the mimeograph, television the photocopier, magnetic tape, compact disc, videocassette recorder and many others that have made sharing information more efficient. Freenet doesn’t do anything different from what can already be done. Artists and publishers all adapted and learned how to use them and profit from them.
“You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don’t agree with. If you want to help build a system which will help humanity share information, even though some of that information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet node. Otherwise, Freenet is not for you.
“Libelous statements are the same as on any other medium. But anonymous statements generally have only minor impact on reputation. The accused is equally free to respond to the accuser which is not the case in most other media. Documents that are not requested by readers will eventually disappear from the network through disuse.
“The battle of copyright infringement has already been lost. Millions of copyrighted audio and video files are already being traded on the Web daily; the absence of Freenet will not change that. The vast majority of copying does not happen online, but instead via old-fashioned, industrial-scale physical CD pressing.
“Copyright is economic censorship (i.e., restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright.”
“Censorship is like a narcotic—a society grows dependent upon it. Even if they have to go through a short period of cold turkey, it is much better that they think for themselves. The functionaries of freedom don’t live in a vacuum. If most people decide that Freenet is unsavory, then it will be small and insignificant.”
Hunter College Professor Clay Shirky write this about Freenet:
“Here is a networking architecture that re-invents the microcomputer as a hybrid client/server while relegating the center of the Internet to nothing but brokering connections.”
Napster, Imesh, and Gnutella are other peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Napster relies upon a single centralized server. Freenet’s decentralized and adaptive characteristics are more efficient, scaleable and safer than all the others.
“Freenet is a perfect machine anarchy,” said Clarke. “No single computer is in control.”
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