To be honest, there should BE NO CONSIDERATION of any worries for you. The freenet share space across everyone's machines is encrypted, can contain nearly anything, randomly chosen by THE NETWORK ITSELF.
IF my some strange change you find yourself the target of an investigation, YOU PERSONALLY CANNOT BE POSSIBLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NETWORK CONTENTS that are on the network share space. The fellow who finds himself in the investigation mentioned in the news stories apparently is under serious suspicion of CHOOSING TO POSSESS ILLEGAL MATERIAL HE CHOSE TO DOWNLOAD, BUT THEN TRIED TO "HIDE" WITH AN ENCRYPTED VIRTUAL DRIVE THAT HE COULD ACCESS. That being said, that was like keeping illegal material IN A STORAGE SPACE WITH AN ENCRYPTED KEY. Freenet is MORE LIKE A CARRIER SERVICE. One cannot by definition decide that the Internet as a whole is illegal because some occasional person may use it illegally. One might as well decide that they cannot use the Postal Service any longer because someone may send out drugs or something and you do not wish to be a "part of the system" or something. As long as you keep in mind that Freenet is a Carrier Service, and do not choose to do anything illegal then you should be fine. Freenet is as the internet should be. Undiluted chaos without control of content. Let the decider of content be each person's conscience. The evil-doers will be found out anyways. For they will do something else wrong in the Real World, more than likely. --- Stephen Walford <stwa4647000 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: --------------------------------- As someone who represents certain individuals who are looking to the Freenet system as a means of securing private/anonymous communications for their perfectly legal activities, I am starting this conversation in order point out a number of apparent, and interrelating vulnerabilities and shortcomings within the system which can affect them with their own particular usage and that also have implications for the general users/participants. Firstly, as it is already awares, criminals and abusers are liable to use the system for trafficking and/or depositing illegal material, and since each (legal) participant devotes a portion of his hard-drive space for the storage of data then that person may end up with some illegal content on his/her computer. Now, of course, all such data would be encrypted and so would on the face of it provide a safeguard to the user should he/she end up with any illegal material. But things aren't as clear-cut as that, and the situation is affected somewhat differently depending on whether the user is operating in the USA or the UK. In the UK, a new law has been brought in which would make it a crime for a suspect who has encrypted data on his computer to fail to reveal the password to the police. Now in a system like Freenet the encryption key would not be known to any individual user, but without any legal precedent as yet (nothing like Freenet has been in operation before) it would be over-optimistic to assume that just because that user puts his case for not being in possession of the key that he would be immune from charges. And in the USA, users with encrypted content are curently protected by a constitutional right to privacy which prevents police from compelling them to disclose their passwords. But right now even that right is being put into question with an important test case taking place (see link below)... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011503663.html?hpid=topnews In either case (USA or UK) the question remains if there would be any reason why any individual users would a priori be targeted for investigation simply for having encrypted content and/or for operating a Freenet server. This is a fuzzy area, and unless the police use traffic analysis to pinpoint likely nodes then one can logically see that only new legislation would enable them to target users at random - something that cannot be ruled out for the future. It is also important to point out that at least in the USA the NSA avails itself to the use of advanced programs that can carry out advanced 'dictionary analysis' to permute nearly every possible combination of letters and numbers for a 'brute force' attack to discover the password for an encrypted file - a process that can take years. This is particularly aimed at file-specific passwords as in personally available encryption programs, or at cracking encrypted files as in email attachments. It is not clear as to whether or not ordinary police forces also employ this technology. Secondly, there are government installations in the UK (for instance a new MI6 building on the London enbankment, which has the national internet traffic channeled through it) which carry out surveillance of communications including internet communications. This surveillance includes not just keyword profiling but also several other different kinds of intelligent and statistical analysis of the traffic itself, even where encrypted files are involved, and an significant intelligence perspective can be obtained in this way. In the face of this, it would be worth knowing what the file traffic profile of Freenet is since the aforesaid situation would impinge a great deal on the privacy and security of such - which is of course exactly what the system is intended for. Obviously these are all issues that the Freenet experts will need to take on board and consider during the course of development, but can anyone provide any answers to all these points in the meantime as they would be greatly appreciated? --------------------------------- Sent from Yahoo! - a smarter inbox.> _______________________________________________ > Support mailing list > Support at freenetproject.org > http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.support > Unsubscribe at > http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support > Or mailto:support-request at freenetproject.org?subject=unsubscribe ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
