Am I the only one who is scared to even try things like Freenet and Tor, for the risk that someone will somehow transmit illegal content across my connection? I'm not talking about content piracy, but the types of things that I don't even want to type for fear of having the terms associated with my username.
You aren't the only one, but with Freenet it's fully encrypted. Let's say you had a Freenet Silk Road application. You won't know it's a Silk Road web page that's being saved along with images of marijuana to your computer unless you go through an indexer/search site and even then you still won't know that those bits of data are stored specifically on your machine.
So in order for the cops to know your machine was used to store the drug listings, the cops would have to spy on your machine and crack the encryption of the Freenet protocol and essentially monitor it. This is why undercover work is important to the police. If no one reports you for the crime of buying drugs and no one discovers the drugs in transit, then the police don't know what's happening. The only way to catch mobsters was through some undercover work and hoping that someone in the criminal network would squeal. If one criminal says the other 10 criminals actually had a hand in committing a crime, the police have more to investigate and can build a case.
If you're not buying drugs or selling drugs and the data related to the drug listings is encrypted when stored on your machine and encrypted when served from your machine, you may be unknowingly helping a criminal to buy or sell drugs. But I'm not sure how that's discoverable by the police and I'm not sure how it would be turned into a criminal investigation. By the argument that you're allowing this, then all ISPs and cell providers are in big trouble because they also enable drug dealing.
There are some horror stories for Tor node operators though.
It's important to note that most of the horror stories involving Tor nodes are related to "exit" nodes. These are the nodes that bridge the open internet with the Tor network. As such, you can see what traffic is traveling through them much more easily.
It's not recommended to run exit nodes if you don't know what you are doing and have a fair bit of resources (time/money) to spend on it. Without exit nodes Tor doesn't work, but they are risky to run because you can be held liable for the content traversing the machine.
Not talking about the legal aspects, but, (and I really, really hate to bring up the "think about the children!" argument here) what about if I am unknowingly helping people who create and share child porn?
It doesn't matter (to me) if I am on the hook for it or not, I just don't know (ethically?) how I would feel if I knew that was going on via my PC. Drugs I don't give a shit about, and I hate how the "think about the children" people screw our rights to privacy, but still...
Honest open question.
Edit: PS, I want you guys to keep doing what you're doing. I completely believe in an open free web, and I want to play my part... I hate the idea of the open web turning into a bunch of mini AOLs... Which is where we seem to be heading at the moment.
I think an important realization to make, is that you can't fully stop behaviour that you find unethical. If somebody has an incentive for doing it, then it's going to happen, somewhere, somehow, in some way.
Therefore, the equation changes - it's not about what least accomodates those with (in your view) unethical behaviour, but about what most accomodates those with ethical behaviour.
That is why highways and Tor make sense, from an ethical point of view, despite them being used for things you ethically disagree with - because those things would happen regardless (there's incentive after all), and you're simply making ethical behaviour easier.
A similar equation applies to DRM, actually, and to why it doesn't and can't work. Those with 'bad' intentions (ie. pirates) have the incentive to break it anyway - financial incentive for commercial pirates, "for the fun of it" for non-commercial pirates.
Your actual customers, however, don't have that incentive, and to them it's an insurmountable wall that they can't get over, even though all they wanted to do was fix a bug that you as a vendor hadn't had time to follow up on yet.
Not using DRM wouldn't change anything about the 'unethical' behaviour - they were going to pirate it anyway - but it would make things better for those with 'ethical' behaviour.
I don't know. I don't want to fully stop pedophiles, as I know that allows for draconian measures which hurt everyone. I know it will happen - always has, always will - but I don't want to automatically make it easier for peds. At least now they have to try hard to be safe, therefore (and I may be completely wrong here) the borderline wannabe pedophile won't go fully fledged, because there would be hurdles. And at the same time I realise that this thinking me that's normal peeps who just want some modicum of privacy also have to jump through hoops, which is why this whole thing is a problem for me.
Also, I think the whole drm analogy doesn't work in this case, though I do see where your coming from.
With my problem, the equivalent would be if adding drm made it automatically easier and safer for pirates, not just crippling legit users...
Maybe think of it this way, if you were a construction worker and helped build an interstate, you'd be helping all sorts of criminals do all sorts of horrible things. Plus innocent people would die in car crashes on the road you helped to build. But we can agree that the utility of an interstate far outweighs these drawbacks.
I get the analogy, but it just doesn't quite... fit this problem for some reason (maybe because there are a lot of crimes I feel aren't crimes, and crashes are just random fate most of the time).
Plus I could think of numerous ways to argue against the analogy that would literally make me sound like a "think of the children!" person...
Maybe I just need to think more about my internal attitudes and justifications for certain things in a more critical, rational way.
When internet first appeared many years ago, it was labelled the "bad" thing too, still is in many parts of world. The "think of ..." is not new and has always been in human history every time there is something new.
Back then, Internet literally made many bad things easier and harder for law and law had to adapt.
You get the point. Why do you think internet today is going back to Aol, technology is always a result of culture.
With a fully distributed model, everyone is essentially running a backbone server. If you don't feel comfortable with such an arrangement, then you'd probably have to opt out. There are plenty of people willing to put up with it, evidenced by the number of companies who have no problem operating the current Internet backbone despite knowing for a fact that their networks are used to distribute child porn and other illegal things. Generally, I think the law is on the side of the distributor, but that's only a legal consolation, not a moral one. I just don't see a way around it. To be fair though, the likelihood of this happening is probably going to be much lower than for a backbone provider, especially if users only serve up content they've consumed themselves (seems like a logical assumption in the distributed system I'm thinking about, but does not have to hold true for all such systems).
I do feel comfortable with being a part of a global backbone server, and you're right, I don't see a way around the moral issue. But I do see a light at the end of the tunnel in the idea of serving what I consume, that is an interesting take on it. But that does also bring up the issue of creating walled gardens (ie niche bubbles) that may not foster the type of Internet I want to see in the future...
For me it's a thorny issue just because of recent articles I've read about the anonymous services really allowing molesters to even set up 'dating' services. As the post above argues about utility outweighing the bad, I want the future great possibilities of an unhindered Web, but I don't want the unheard of new ways people can abuse children. (I've stated before that there are a lot of crimes I don't care about too strongly, but this area gets me, mainly because I have small kids right now)
Perhaps better to take the economical perspective than moral perspective. The coin miner is the backbone of bitcoin, or where all the resource of encryption needed come from, by moral supporters?
Any distributed web attempt must learn from bitcoin and understand the economic ecosystem is required and essential. It beats all pointless endless arguments and find it way to success.
The burden of supporting free speech is supporting speech that you may disagree with. Reputable civil liberties organizations like the ACLU regularly fight to protect the rights of groups (KKK[0], neo-Nazis[1], etc.) that they disagree with. You do not have to support the content of someone's speech to support their right to free speech.
I am completely fine with free speech. Even though I hate neo-nazis with a passion, I would also stand in line to allow them to speak freely. But I have had many a bruise from fighting the neos when their speech moves to action. And I'm not talking about being an antifa who goes to protests to fight neo-nazis, but when I've seen them beating on people of colour I've jumped right in and fought them tooth and nail. (And because I'm of mixed race myself, I've had to defend my own butt on more than a few occasions)
Back to my original problem, I wouldn't want to ban child porn fiction, or such similar speech, but I would similarly fight tooth and nail to stop pedophiles swapping children amongst themselves with no repercussions. It's enabling the physical actions I have a problem with - and I'm pretty sure the ACLU doesn't defend KKK members who have actually perpetrated a hate crime.
It's a fine line, I know, but to me it's definitely an iron line...
It all reduces down to this: tech X can enable Y evil things so should we allow X to exist? Interstates were a good example as traffickers depend heavily on them. Cameras are vital to spread of child porn online. Printing presses and printers if not that. Pencils if it gets down to sketching. They're even doing animated stuff according to some sources: there goes any non-locked-down video game system. Traffickers also use cars, 18 wheelers, trains, and boats.
The tool/tech X can aid evil Y is weak because the good from X far outweighs Y. There's always an evil minority. Obsessive people motivated by control or money will find a way to act on those motivations. They'll use whatever tools are at their disposal. We shouldn't stop having freedom, privacy, Internet anonymity, etc w/ all the benefits because an abuse might happen. That you possessed or sold a technology someone might have abused is on them, not you. And they're pretty good at getting away with it even without anonymity tools or crypto.
But, believe me, most Americans are happy to abuse the hell out of children with tech so long as it's the foreign children building America's tech for 10-12 hr straight at horrid wages and conditions to make that tech cheaper. ;) What you worry about is at record lows and what I just mentioned is at record highs. American double standard, just them worrying about the wrong things, or both?
