On 07/26/2011 06:15 AM, Matthew Toseland wrote > The electronic attacks mentioned above are far cheaper than any scheme to try > to get people who run Freenet to spy on their friends. You can only spy on > your direct friends (well, it gets less accurate the more hops away the > target, but this also makes opennet surveillance much cheaper). Putting 10% > of the population on the payroll (as in East Germany) is always a rather > expensive way to gather intelligence! > > The hope is that there will be a large enough global darknet that those who > have a particular need for it (for instance those who publish subversive > political blogs) will be able to connect to their friends (who the > authorities already know about from e.g. phone records), who don't.
I guess I'm either not understanding darknet, or I'm not understanding the underlying reason(s) for Freenet as a whole. I was under the impression that darknet leaves you wide open to your friends, so choose your friends carefully. Opennet still left you open to those who connect with you, but you might have some level of anonymity when communicating. I also believe I read in one of your posts here a while back that while Freenet packets are encrypted and can't be audited for content from outside the Freenet network, it's still fairly easy to spot Freenet node activity even without knowing the specifics of what's moving in and out of that node. Now in most democratic countries, the government has to jump through certain legal hoops in order to seize one's equipment, arrest a person, etc. But if Freenet is built with the goal of allowing dissidents to communicate below the radar of a totalitarian government, by your description it seems doomed to failure. If a government-controlled ISP can use traffic analysis to spot Freenet traffic, and if they don't have legal hoops to jump through, can't that government then easily place one darknet person under house arrest and keep the darknet node running? Doesn't that give them the packet contents as well as the packet originator? And how would one securely connect to someone in darknet mode unless you know the operator of that node personally? If that person turned out to be a spy, doesn't connecting to him in darknet mode leave you with no anonymity whatsoever? _______________________________________________ Support mailing list Support@freenetproject.org http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support Unsubscribe at http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support Or mailto:support-requ...@freenetproject.org?subject=unsubscribe
