Quoth Sam Joseph on Sunday, 27 May: : : ... I'm heavily in favour of free speech, but it seems to me : that free speech is a different concept from free file-sharing. : ... I end up being unsure about who I am helping by : running a Freenet node ... Your thoughts are a very positive contribution to the public discourse on this subject. Thank you. I'll try to rise to your level of discourse. I tend to think of such issues from the point of view of a developer: Should I be contributing to this project, which has the potential to contribute, albeit indirectly, to the harm of other persons? Casting the issue in those terms makes some potentially useful historical analogies available. Would you have contributed to the Manhattan project? What if Abu Nidal or Tim McVeigh or (insert favorite demon here) detonates a nuclear device in (insert favorite city here)? What if a global thermonuclear war destroys the species? Would such hypothetical eventualities change your answer? Is it worthwhile to contribute to work in biotech which can be reasonably expected to result in (1) saving the lives of thousands from untimely demise due to disease and/or (2) killing millions/billions in a future war or ecoterrorist action? Systems which insure free electronic expression of ideas (arguably, a basic human right) are necessarily anonymizing. This enables whistle-blowing. But anonymity also leads to the problem Plato has Socrates describe with the fable of the ring of Gyges, which renders the wearer invisible: Many persons, when no longer held accountable, will abuse their freedoms to the harm of others. Is it a cop-out to say that 'someone would have invented it anyhow'? In stark terms: If I don't gas the gypsies, I'll be shot, and someone else will do it anyhow. More typical cases involve weighing some lifestyle inconvenience against some less eggregiously transgressive assault on humanity, but the analogy serves to place the issue in high contrast. My opinion is that the responsible individual must weigh the expected harm against the expected benefit, to the best of their ability, but that ultimately the moral onus of the use of a tool falls on the user, not on the toolmaker -- because, in general, one cannot reasonably expect to predict the moral consequences of other people's decisions. Here's a blue-sky suggestion proposing to resolve the moral dilemmas of freenet. I begin with the assumption that the conflicting corrupt motivations of humans in large groups tend to cancel each other out (thus democracy can be used to *moderate* evil). Envision a system which permits users to vote as to whether the publisher of a document, media asset, whatever, should be divulged, to be held accountable. If a sufficient proportion of the users vote, and some large fraction favor revelation, perhaps 2/3, then the publisher's anonymity collapses. (I think this can be done. For example, suppose that publication involves the dissemination of fragments of a FEC-ed identifier to a large number of random nodes.) Personally, I think freenet is not so *very* anonymous, and that it merely discourages publish identification by requiring a certain level of resources to break anonymity. Whether that level is high enough to protect the innocent, or low enough to visit justice upon the evil doer, will depend on the motivations of those who have those resources, and the vagaries of the technology race on both sides of the fence. Perhaps a system which was more rigorously anonymized, and yet made explicit provision to break anonymity would be better able to balance the ethical concerns. _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/chat
