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

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 12:04:19PM +0200, Matthew Exon wrote:
> Matthew Toseland wrote:
> >On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 10:33:59AM +0200, Matthew Exon wrote:
> 
> >>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.
> >
> >
> >It is quite possible to manually migrate content between darknets (without
> >being the content author, and without disrupting the linkage).
> 
> Sure.  But why would I do that?  The only reason would be if I believed 
> that lots of people who aren't on the nice darknet would want to see it. 
>  You're right that some people wouldn't participate in both networks 
> because of bandwidth constraints, but I can't help feeling that this 
> would be a fairly small number.  There's no hard lower limit on how much 
> bandwidth you need, especially with the new version; so no matter how 
> little you have you can always share it.

I meant primarily human bandwidth. It is more hassle to have two nodes,
especially as you need people to connect to, and different voting rules.
> 
> >>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.
> >
> >Hmmm. Plausible deniability, yes. Security, no.
> 
> Fair enough.  Am I right that plausible deniability for the nasty 
> darknet is pretty much blown?  Is this a big problem?

I'm not sure that it is a big problem.
> 
> >>(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.)
> >
> >
> >Al Qaeda could use the main darknet, and make sure nobody found their
> >content. That is if they used freenet at all. This option is open to any
> >sufficiently closed group, of course, but they are vulnerable to a
> >disgruntled member (or a mistake).
> 
> OK, Al Qaeda just decided to do precisely that.  So now I, as a nice 
> darknet participant, have to live with the knowledge that I'm helping Al 
> Qaeda plan their terrorist attacks.  We're back where we started aren't we?

No, we're not. We know for example that child porn is not being *openly*
distributed. And this is for a very broad definition of open. On IIP I
knew a certain channel where you could obtain keys for such filth; on a
network like the one proposed it would be easy to find it, and then
complain about it.
> 
> In other words, for the censorship system to make a difference, there 
> has to be an incentive not to *hide* content on darknets that don't want 
> it.  It's not enough to just punish the posting of open content.

No. Open publishing is an issue. And the more people that use a given
block of content the more likely it is that we will hear of it. And
Freenet is surely used by paedophiles to contact other paedophiles they
were not yet in contact with, and even to entice people in. Some
openness is essential for these people, if only for recruiting purposes.
This is not the case for Al Qaeda, however, if the police came to us
with absolute proof, we _could_ give them the poster, on a network that
allowed IP addresses to be broadcast as an extreme sanction (but most
networks probably wouldn't allow this as it is dangerous to the network
itself).
> 
> >>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?
> >
> >
> >A small darknet may actually be safer in terms of its likelihood of
> >exposure. If the state randomly searches people's computers, obviously
> >you're in trouble no matter what.
> 
> Yes and no.  The scenario I was thinking of is the agent provocateur. 
> Guy I meet down the pub offers to bring me into a darknet, but of course 
> he's actually a cop.  If it's a general darknet without any particular 
> focus, no-one can know for sure that I set out to find dead chicken 
> porn.  But if I specifically needed a dead chicken porn darknet, then 
> this would have come up somehow when I was talking to the cop, so it's 
> rather more serious.  It still seems like trying to find dead chicken 
> porn is going to be far riskier with the censorship system in place than 
> without it.

If you only have one connection onto the darknet, you're screwed in any
case. Same applies if you got several connections all from him.
> 
> >Depends what you mean by discriminating against, I suppose. Minorities
> >who the majority vehemently opposes would have to form their own
> >darknets. When they try to join with the main darknets, they'd be
> >expelled en bloc.
> 
> What I mean by discriminating against is, where does this lie on a 
> continuum from "has no effect on" to "making it more difficult" to 
> "making it impossible"?  Ideally, it wouldn't be any harder to find 
> minority material than to find majority material.

In which case the system would be ineffective, and there would be no
point.
> 
> >I doubt that even a censorable freenet would ever be
> >so mainstream that what is mistakenly illegal in real life is always
> >voted down - but if it is we can always build an alternative community.
> 
> For purposes of this discussion, I think it's worth each of us assuming 
> that we belong to the minority, not the majority.  The majority really 
> isn't the interesting bit of Freenet.
> 
> To be specific: China.  China has a pro-democracy movement.  It might be 
> illegal, but it's very popular, and very widespread, especially in the 
> technology-rich East.  Any Freenet community that gets built up in China 
> is likely to be based around pro-democracy Han Chinese students and all 
> their computers.  Due to the great firewall of China, a strongly 
> connected Chinese darknet would form, weakly connected to the rest of 
> the world. (The firewall can't stop Freenet, but it sure as hell slows 
> everything to a crawl.)
> 
> China also has a Tibetan independence movement.  Not nearly as many 
> people as the massive Han-based pro-democracy movement, and very few 
> have access to computers.  On the Chinese darknet, Tibetan independence 
> advocates are the tiny despised minority.  And anyone who thinks that 
> Chinese students are libertarian should try talking to them.  Chinese 
> pro-democracy advocates are, if anything, *more* nationalist, racist and 
> paternalist than the government.  I really don't believe they would 
> think twice about turning in "separatists" to the government, just as I 
> wouldn't have too much trouble turning in Al Qaeda members.
> 
> The Tibetan activists are trapped behind the Chinese firewall with all 
> the Han Chinese.  They need to be allowed on to the Chinese darknet so 
> they can communicate with their friends in India and the West.
> 
> So the question is, how do we ensure that the Tibetan activists can 
> participate on Freenet without unnecessary fear of reprisal?  Does the 
> censorship system put them at risk?  I still don't know if it does or 
> not, but I certainly don't have a lot of faith in the view of the 
> majority, even the Freenet majority.

Well, what is the alternative? Most of the pro-democracy people, and
almost all of the oppressed churches, not able to use Freenet at all,
because of the knowledge that their PCs will carry child porn if they
do, and their objection to it along with most of the rest of humanity.

As regards Tibettan independance.. the pro-democracy students would only
be in a position to turn in Tibettan supporters if they actually knew
them. Which does not change the situation from where it is now (unless
the network allowed the extreme sanction of revealing an IP address, but
that is unlikely IMHO). What would change would be that the Tibettans
would have to run their own separate darknet.
-- 
Matthew J Toseland - toad-EI5O+8PHWbJeeLb3ft/[email protected]
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.

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