Alternative Net Protects Pirates by Leander Kahney 3:00 a.m. 8.Mar.2000 PST Open-source advocates are developing an alternative publishing network that promises to provide true anonymity in sharing documents and files over the Internet. But in addition to protecting free speech, the new system also could be a boon for multimedia pirates. Freenet is an open-source file-transfer system similar to the Web for sharing digital content such as HTML pages and MP3 music files. It will be run by connected clusters of servers or node stations that could in turn be run on almost any PC connected to the Internet. But unlike the Web, Freenet has no centralized administrative infrastructure of domain name servers (DNS) and IP addresses that can be used to track users. Hosting and replicating documents and files requires that Freenet backers volunteer their time and resources. Because Freenet aims to be anonymous, secure, and without centralized control, it would make it almost impossible to trace people who post content -- legal or otherwise -- onto the network. "My primary motivation was to make it very difficult to censor information," said Ian Clarke, an Irish programmer who designed the system. "With the Internet there's the potential to censor and monitor people to a degree that's never been possible before. I wanted to develop the technology to make this impossible." Clarke started work on Freenet 18 months ago as a graduate student in artificial intelligence at Edinburgh University. He had been outraged by the Australian government's proposal to introduce sweeping censorship laws, which went into effect in January. Clarke hopes to launch the first public version in the spring, but he said the system is still pretty rough. The server is nearly finished, but so far there are no browsers, or clients, to make the network easy to use. Freenet software will be released under the GNU public license, which will allow anyone to freely distribute and change the source code. The system is being written in Java by about a dozen programmers internationally. They have never met nor even spoken over the phone -- all communication is by email, Clarke said. Both authors and readers can choose to be anonymous if they so wish, Clarke said. Like the Web, the network is navigated by a client, or browser. He said it will even be difficult to determine if someone is running a Freenet server and what information is being stored on it, Clarke said. Alex Fowler of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that while he generally supports anti-censorship tools, Freenet could create as many problems as it solves. Fowler said that Freenet could be a useful tool in countries like Singapore or China that censor the Net or quash free speech. But he doesn't like the idea that you wouldn't be able to remove sensitive information -- such as someone's medical records. "There's no way to tell if a project like this will actually take off," he said. "It�s certainly going to raise some questions with a whole lot of people. Not just copyright holders, but governments too." Patrick Ball, deputy director of the Science and Human Rights Program with the American Association for the Advancement for Science, said tools like anonymizers, strong cryptography, and Freenet tend not to help activists who are not already under surveillance because using them is in itself suspicious and tends to alert the authorities. "I�m for any application that protects dissidents," he said. "But there�s a higher order problem that�s very difficult to get around, and that�s by using these tools you draw attention to yourself." Although Clarke designed Freenet to protect free speech, he thinks that the safeguards they are building in to make it difficult to track down those who distribute content could lead to its notoriety as a vehicle for copyright piracy. The system was designed to make it impossible to find out where files are physically stored. Information posted to the network is stored on multiple servers simultaneously, making it difficult to remove a file. In fact, Clarke said any attempt to remove information causes it to be copied to other servers on the network. The only way to remove information is to disable the entire network, which may prove difficult if it becomes popular and is running on thousands of PCs all over the globe. However, Clarke said the network cannot be guaranteed to permanently store information. Only popular files survive for any period of time. Older, unpopular files would be overwritten by more popular ones. "As a project we don't want to be labeled as hackers who distribute warez or copyrighted material," he said. "The purpose of Freenet is to promote freedom of information, but there is an inevitable consequence there that it might lead to violation of copyright law." "The potential for protecting freedom of speech is more important than protecting copyright, which is an economic tool," Clarke added. Clarke noted that Freenet can be functionally identical to Napster, the wildly popular network for sharing music online. But while the Recording Industry Association of America is currently seeking a court order to shut down Napster's central servers, it would be almost impossible to disable a Freenet network running on machines all over the world. "Because it's decentralized no one can be held responsible for it," Clarke said. "Once it's released there's no point coming after me because there's nothing I, nor anyone else, can do to shut it down." Eric Scheirer, a music technology researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said Freenet is an interesting experiment, but said it would likely be used only by a small community of pirates and "privacy nuts." "If it is adopted, it will be adopted by people who want to exchange illegal information and by people who are rabid about privacy and security, which is a relatively small universe," Scheirer said. Scheirer pointed out that the Web is trustworthy because of the content on certain domains, and he likes the convenience of tracking devices such as cookies that remember log-in names and passwords. "Many of the advantages of Freenet are disadvantages to me," he said. Nonetheless, Scheirer said the advent of Freenet and Gnapster, an open-source clone of Napster, illustrated the need for debate about copyright laws in the age of ubiquitous digital distribution channels. "There are larger questions about the implications of these technologies," Scheirer said.
