So, what happens if your IP address somehow become associated with trafficking child pornography? You run the risk of getting raided by a decidedly non-technical police force, having every electronic device you own confiscated for an indeterminate amount of time and being charged with a felony by a non-technical district attorney's office.
Even in the case where they eventually realize you didn't have anything to do with it and drop the charges your life has been turned upside down in the process. In the worst case, a district attorney could choose to try and take the case to trial regardless and then your fate is in the hands of a non-technical jury.
I just can't personally accept a risk like that in order to contribute hard drive space and computing power to a darknet project like freenet.
Simply because it's a witch hunt is the problem, not the hunt it's self but the ppl who are to afraid to be called pedophiles to stand up against the hunt.
It's not find and good to sit there and watch someone being persecuted unjustly, you've got to keep in mind that it could just as easily happen to you.
I like the "this is normal, everybody does it" defense. If everyone were to run Freenet and store child pornography on their computer, then the which hunt ends at that. I've not seen the new MLK movie, but something along those lines where ppl are willing to die so that others may run Freenet without issue.
One should not fear the life of a Marter, one should fear living in a world where there are not any. -- Michael Mestnik.
It's a problem you run into with any darknet, but Freenet seems to have it a lot worse than Tor .onions. I have trawled around onionland a few times and saw only a few links that seemed like they might point in that direction, and didn't follow them. Most of Tor seemed pretty free of the stuff, and most of the directories seemed to have a policy against it.
I think this is a special case of a more general problem with libertarianism. There are in general two kinds of libertarians: those who want to maximize freedom for humanistic reasons, and those who want to maximize freedom because they want to be free to bully and exploit people without supervision or interference. Child pornographers fit into the latter, a category they share with people who want financial deregulation so they can fleece investors with pump and dump scams or KKK types who want the Federal government out of our lives so they can establish local tyrannies and oppress minorities.
I've also heard stories of very realistic looking rape porn -- maybe a bit too realistic -- in places like this. It's gross.
Non-creeps shouldn't use cash to purchase anything. People will almost always use money to purchase drugs, because it's extremely difficult to trace.
Just because people use something for something illegal, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used at all. In fact, if more people use darknets for legitimate activities, then there is less illegal activity going on overall (looking at it percentage wise, there would still be arguably the same amount going on).
I don't like the fact that these things occur on darknets. But these places are perfect for them, and I highly doubt these darknets would be created solely for the purpose of illegal activities.
Imagine you walk into a hotel. There's a guy in the lobby with a visible gun on his hip, and he's not a cop. The elevator opens up and someone's getting a blow job from a hooker. There's a dead roach in the corner. Would you stay there? With your kids?
It's not a question of should or shouldn't. What I'm saying is that normal people will run away screaming from a network that's full of child porn. They won't use it. As a result, it loses its utility for non-creepy but legitimate uses like political expression. The swimming pool is yellowish and stinky.
You can use Freenet the same way. Use the indexes that exclude such content or use the uncensored index and ignore the content that has warnings.
If you use Freemail, Sone and FMS it's unlikely you'll randomly encounter CP unless you are looking for it.
I use Freenet as a decentralized twitter-like, an encrypted email and mirroring my blog. For those purposes it works fine. Having more users using the network for normal purposes would be good.
Saying "I didn't follow a link because I was unsure of what was behind it." is the same as never having followed that link. Why bother to say "There is child port on Freenet." and then in the same breath say "I've never seen it." That's the same as keeping your stupid mouth shut, but unfortunately stupidity like yours is simply contagious.
If your statements are correct, then that would mean that Everyone You've spoken with has actually seen kidporn. Does that include your hairdresser? We don't really care about the hear say of someone who can't remember the last time he/she talked to someone about something other than Freenet.
At least tell us how many ppl you've talked to who claim to have actually seen child pornography? I sure haven't and I've seen a lot of porn, even went looking for the stuff and have only come close. There was a few times when I though "ohh, there it is", but then did some research only to discover that the model in question was in her mid 20s. Now that's not to say the content of the images was legal. My understanding is that if it looks like a kid, then it's just as illegal as the "genuine??" article. That is had drawn images of children are illegal, even though no children were harmed.
If there is kidporn on Freenet, then do the correct thing please post a takedown request.
But even if Freenet users were immune from prosecution for what's in the data store on their hard drives, does that make the possibility of aiding the distribution of child pornography any less repugnant? What about other material that goes far beyond simply being offensive?
The true test of someone who claims to believe in Freedom of Speech is whether they tolerate speech which they disagree with, or even find disgusting.
If we are in favor of truly anonymous and free communication, we must not try to censor the content at all. The question is whether we really do support freedom of speech. In many (all?) European countries for example, freedom of speech is restricted. The freedom stops where it does harm to other people. It is a difficult problem to judge on a case by case basis when the freedom to communicate is more important than the feelings of other people.
Someone could claim that there was some child porn embedded in the centre of a mountain but it would be just a claim. There would fundamentally be no way to prove that it was any particular thing unless someone admits to putting it there.
The people that invented the cryptography very much intended to create this philosophical situation. We can't pretend otherwise without breaking the cryptography.
Either way, there's the objective fact of what you are doing (which is independent of your knowledge of the fact) and the degree of your complicity in the action. The parent is saying that they are uncomfortable with knowing that there is an x% chance they are aiding in the distribution of child pornography. There's an argument to be made that providing infrastructure is very different from active engagement, but it's bizarre to pretend that because you can't objectively know what each packet contains that you are therefore absolved of all knowledge of the situation.
In the western legal canons, mens rea / intent either conditional or unconditional must be present for a criminal act.
I would not say I dedicate storage to freenet knowing that some of the content on my property is child porn in order for free speech to flourish. That could be construed as conditional intent.
I would say I dedicate storage to freenet in order to (insert reason here). I have no idea what is being stored in the box nor could I know.
They may not be storing anything (yet [1]), but they're still passing along unknown traffic.
In fact they're even LESS aware of what their relays are being used for than a Freenet node operator, who can, if they choose to, both discover some of what is in their data store, and purge specific data from it given a known key (though it would be an endless battle and perhaps expose them to even more legal risk).
[1] It's not hard to imagine a future Tor version implementing a successor to hidden services that involves caching or securely storing data in some manner that completely prevents the relay operator from knowing what is there.
Lots of things can go wrong in such cases, but in both directions.