[Freedombox-discuss] Dumb idea: Alternative to Tor that promotes good behavior

[Jesper Tholstrup Pedersen]

Hi.

What you are suggesting is that it is possible to hold an anonymous
person accountable to previous behaviour without identifying that
person. This is simply not possible. When you embed identifying
information into the stream of information you also expose the sender
and/or receiver making them indentifiable.

You simply can not have anonymity [1], surveillance [2] and censorship
[3] in the same solution!

Throughout human history every means of censorship has been misused in
order to enforce the power structures of the day. 
That goes for today too; in several countries where child pornography
filters have been established the same solutions are now used to block
sites that promote file sharing and bittorrent tracker sites. All over
the world ISPs are slowly being tasked to police their trafic through so
called trade agreements. 

I belive that this kind of policing of the trafic will be legally
enforced for private subscribers as well within the next decade!

As long as the solutions that are being built enable surveillance and
censorship in any way it will be used against the very people that were
meant to be anonymous.

I know that most people think that censorship can be rationalized in
certain circumstances and I agree that some topics/behaviour are simply
despicable but the solution is not to incorporate surveillance and
censorship into the very software that is supposed to give freedom to
the people since that would ensure that they will never achive freedom
from those in power. 

And that is my goal; to support and promote software, hardware and
infrastructure that enables the users to achive freedom.

Regards
Jesper

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship


On Sun, 2013-10-27 at 13:26 -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> I would love feedback on an idea for promoting more internet freedom.
> 
> Here's the problem: Tor has little public support, because most Tor
> traffic is wasted on supporting bad behavior.  When I ran a Tor node, it
> became clear that most of my bandwidth was being wasted on video
> downloads.  People want to promote free speech, not child pornography.
> 
> Here's my solution: Build a Tor-like network for routing anonymous data,
> but track behavior of all users' secret identities, and make their
> Internet history public.  Allow node operators to choose categories of
> public identities they which to support.
> 
> For example, I would choose to promote all forms of non-violent free
> speech.  I should be able to contribute my bandwidth to this purpose.
> If a dissident in China goes by the public ID of ChinaCat, and has a
> high reputation for promoting freedom, they are welcome to use my
> bandwidth.  If someone just wants access to redtube.com, they can get
> that access from someone else.
> 
> There are various technical aspects to this idea.  For example, would
> prefer that the social graph between secret identities be public so I
> can use a simple network flow algorithm over trust edges between
> identities to determine how much I trust someone.  The entire social
> network should be P2P, like Tor, and it should route a lot of dummy
> traffic to help hide the real traffic.  With the considerably lower
> bandwidth that is needed to promote freedom rather than free porn, this
> should be no problem.
> 
> What do you guys think?
> Bill
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Freedombox-discuss mailing list
> Freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss