Re: Crazy idea: How trust in darknets enables secure democratic censorship

Evan Daniel wrote:

>>>It sounds to me like this has potential
>>>to enforce groupthink through network value effects.
>>
>>Please elaborate...
> 
> 
> The central large network is against some content.  The fact that it
> is larger makes it much more valuable as a network.  Therefore I am
> inclined to act in such a way as to stay on the big network.  That
> means participating in and reinforcing any existing groupthink, right?
>  And that positive feedback loop means there will be groupthink and
> that it will probably be strong and evident.

In fact, I think this would go even further: the network would 
inevitably split not into "x not allowed"/"x allowed" darknets, but 
effectively into "x not allowed"/"ONLY x allowed" darknets.

My reasoning:

As Toad said, you can participate on more than one darknet 
simultaneously.  If you can do that, why would you ever limit yourself 
to just one tiny darknet of dead chicken lovers?  Of course you're going 
to be on both.  So I'm on two darknets now; the nice darknet with no 
dead chicken fetishism and the nasty darknet where dead chicken 
fetishism is allowed.  The nice darknet is 100 times bigger than the 
nasty darknet.  If I want to download star trek episodes where do I go? 
  The nice darknet; it'll be way faster.  If I want to download dead 
chicken porn, I go to the nasty darknet.  A little complicated, but 
overall I'm happy.

Now, eventually everyone's going to behave the same way.  Everyone will 
figure out that there's just no point posting star trek episodes to the 
nasty darknet, since they'll always be more easily available on the nice 
darknet.  Result: the nasty darknet will have nothing but dead chicken 
porn.  There's no reason to post anything else there, and no-one will 
ever download anything else from it.

My question is: how secure is the nasty darknet now?  It seems that much 
of the security or plausible deniability of freenet stems from having a 
good quantity of legitimate content alongside the punishable content. 
But now the nasty darknet is 100% dead chicken porn.  If the authorities 
can demonstrate that I participated in that particular darknet at all, 
I'm screwed.

(Sure, I know that you're assuming freenet is illegal; but there's 
illegal and then there's illegal.  An Al Qaeda darknet will have a lot 
more resources thrown at it, and a lot more rules bent, in order to 
uncover all the participants than, say, an MP3 sharing network.)

So it seems to me that any dead chicken porn fetishist reading this 
discussion should be totally opposed, because it would leave him more 
exposed.  And the whole point of Freenet is to be there for persecuted 
minorities, right?

I should say though, I think Toad is doing the right thing by thinking 
about this.  He's absolutely right that many people who could and should 
benefit from Freenet will be turned off by the thought of who else 
they're helping.  In fact, these are precisely the people (Tibetan 
independance activists, Burmese pro-democracy supporters, Iranian 
secularists) who deserve Freenet more than people who just swap MP3s or 
porn.

If local censorship can be implemented without discriminating against 
minority opinions, I think it's worth pursuing.  But I must admit I'd be 
rather more satisfied if the answer turned out to be "no, it's not 
possible after all; we're just going to have to learn to get along as 
one big disfunctional family".