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

Matthew Toseland wrote:

> 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.

Ah.  Yes, that's true.  But getting access to the nice darknet should be 
pretty easy in comparison to getting access to the nasty darknet.  I 
still find it hard to imagine someone only using the nasty one.  It'd 
happen, but I don't think it would generate enough harmless traffic to 
camouflage the bad stuff.

>>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.

It bothers me somewhat.  Just for the record.

>>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.

Why do I, or Chinese christians, care whether the content is being 
distributed openly or secretly?  It's still being distributed, right? 
It's entirely possible that Al Qaeda are swapping jokes about the London 
Underground through my node right now.  The fact that it's invisible to 
me doesn't make me any happier about it.

>>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.

But in an agent provocateur scenario, only one of my contacts has to be 
a cop.  If you're telling me I need to get several connections, that 
only makes my chances of one of them being a sting operation so much higher.

>>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.

Ah, in that case I think I've been misinterpreting your emails.  You 
talk about "would have to set up their own darknet" as if that's no big 
deal.  That is, you're not forbidding content, just moving it around. 
But if your goal really is to stop people distributing the stuff, that's 
different.  And no, when it comes to the particular minority material I 
want to distribute (my explosive and controversial revelations that the 
planet Jupiter is actually made of frogs), I don't want anyone censoring 
me, not even a majority of Freenet users.

I thought you were trying to set it up so that porn can be traded as 
easily as now, but that I could still ensure that no porn passes through 
my node.  So I'd have a clear conscience, without anyone being cut off 
from the data they want.  In theory.  In practice, it looks like it 
won't work out so neatly.

>>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.

The alternative is for pro-democracy students to have to make a choice 
as to whether democracy is or is not more important than the integrity 
of the Chinese nation.  I believe many students would decide that 
democracy is indeed more important.  This would in turn mean that the 
Tibetans can communicate with the rest of the world.  Of course, these 
are long-haired yobbo students.  For christian priests it might come out 
differently.

It's a balancing act for all of us.  Here, I'm giving a higher priority 
to a small number of Tibetan bhuddists than a large number of Han 
christians, but of course that's just one corner of the planet, and it's 
not as if I live anywhere near the place.  I don't think there's a 
simple answer.  We're certainly not going to have our cake and eat it too.

As an aside, I wouldn't put too much faith in Chinese christians 
spending a lot of time worrying about child porn.  I'm sure they're not 
in favour of it, but it's just not the hot-button issue that it is in 
the West.  Porn in general, maybe, but probably not enough to stop them 
joining the students' porntastic darknet.

> 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.

What I mean is that the Tibetans rely on Han Chinese for access to the 
rest of the world.  Connections from Tibet to the West can be policed 
more heavily than connections from Tibet to Shanghai, or connections 
from Shanghai to the rest of the world.  By forming their own darknet 
from which Tibetans are forbidden, Han Chinese could effectively set up 
a wall cutting off Tibetans from the fat data pipes that hook up to the 
East coast.

Tibetans would be free to set up their own darknet within Tibet, but 
what's the point if they can't smuggle footage of human rights abuses 
out to Amnesty International?  And the new darknet would be such a 
tempting target for the Chinese government; much more so than a million 
students who, at the end of the day, much of the government regards as 
pretty harmless.
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