I stay away from it because chunks of the data is hosted on your local machine, and it could potentially contain very unsavory data. Sure it's encrypted but try to explain that to your local law enforcement.
And even if law enforcement could successfully convince a court that you're doing something illegal by hosting data which you cannot look into:
They couldn't first acquire the necessary search warrant because they couldn't prove that you are the one who is hosting the particular piece of illegal data: Freenet's routing algorithm is anonymized, both the people who retrieve data and the people who store it are anonymous. (Disclaimer: The security of the anonymization depends on how you've configured Freenet. In the less secure modes a well-funded attacker can de-anonymize you.)
So if law enforcement knows a certain file is evil then they cannot easily find out the IP addresses of the people who store it, and the people who store it don't know that they are doing so.
Hence it is censorship-resistant :)
If someone downloads something on Freenet they don't know where it is coming from.
You do NOT want your defense in court to rest on convincing a judge or jury of this.
In fact we cannot have people rent out condos or houses anymore either because illegal stuff will happen there and the owner is responsible even if they don't know!
Also we need to shut down all ISPs because at some point in time illegal data was cached on their machines during transit!?
You may be innocent, but you'll be spending tens of thousands of dollars and a chunk of your life agonizing over it before "justice" is realized.
No. What they said is that you don’t want to have to convince a jury that you aren’t responsible for stuff that is on your computer
I’m so tired of people arguing in bad faith. Debate what people believe, not a stupid version you made up to score points.
1) The crime in question is not just that you acquired the content, but that you disseminated it. This is in sharp distinction from a hotel, in which the person renting the room is the perpetrator. It's not like there is some RICO statute that hotel owners routinely get pinned with when renting rooms out to shady people unless they are literally involved in RICO.
2) CASM is unique among crimes (in the USA) in that knowing of it and NOT reporting it is itself a crime. You cannot claim that you were frightened. So you now have to prove that you never decrypted it yourself, on top of evidence that you disseminated it.
This is not a position you want to be in legally.
But how will they read it if even you can't?
plot twist: It's an one-time pad to xor your data against.
(and of course, they wouldn't generate it from XORing your data against illegal data...)
It's simple for anyone to create an xor "key" for anything.
I bet you’re just using those unencrypted images to hide evil stuff with steganography! We found illegal content by xoring our totally not invented xor "keys" with the noise in your JPEGs!
You're only going to have a few encrypted chunks of a given file in your datastore, you don't know what the file chunks are when put together or the key used to decrypt it. Information is neutral on Freenet. You would NOT get in trouble just for running a Freenet node in any sane/ free country in the world. If you go out of your way to use Freenet for something illegal, that's another matter entirely.
If you're paranoid, just use a VPN or install it to a VPS and SSH into it.