Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

[RoninLB]

comments

the article i read had a few "forward" sites linked to names etc so i guess you could google the article for them





Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

By JIM DWYER
Published: February 15, 2011

On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonspoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.
The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said.

“They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”

The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he said. “It stores everything you care about.”

Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.

“We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” he said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”

Not many law professors have Mr. Moglen’s credentials as lawyer and geek, or, for that matter, his record as an early advocate for what looked like very long shots.

Growing up on the West Side of Manhattan, he began fooling around with computers as a boy. In 1973, at age 14, he was employed writing programs for the Scientific Time Sharing Corporation. At 26, he was a young lawyer, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. Later, he got a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He was also the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard M. Stallman, which aggressively — and successfully — protected the ability of computer scientists, hackers and hobbyists to build software that was not tied up by copyright, licensing and patents.

In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.

This month, Mr. Moglen, who now runs the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke to a convention of 2,000 free-software programmers in Brussels, urging them to get to work on the Freedom Box.

Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year have been building a decentralized social network called Diaspora.

Mr. Moglen said that if he could raise “slightly north of $500,000,” Freedom Box 1.0 would be ready in one year.

“We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression,” Mr. Moglen said. “Being connected works.”

[wdfifteen]

Given the importance of communication to a free society and the fact that our government has had a communications kill switch since 1934, I think this is a great idea.

[sammyg2]

The gubmint would never allow that to happen. They like watching our every move.

(PS I wonder who will be the first to ask, "it'd still be able to get prOn, right?"

[Moses]

If he is successful, Mr. Moglun should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Liberty is impossible without free expression of ideas. All governments are by nature repressive. This could be a powerful tool in the struggle for freedom.

[VINMAN]

Originally Posted by Moses

If he is successful, Mr. Moglun should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. .

That "prize" has lost all its meaning and crediblity....

[RoninLB]

how about the "Ron Paul Prize for Liberty"

[Moses]

Originally Posted by VINMAN

That "prize" has lost all its meaning and crediblity....

Sad, but true.

Originally Posted by RoninLB

how about the "Ron Paul Prize for Liberty"

Great idea!

[slakjaw]

Yea. Right. For just 500k I could build you a mono rail. And all you have to do is plug a box into your wall. Sure.

[RWebb]

[RoninLB]

a geek lawyer involved with the group building the Freedom Box gives a talk to other geeks pleading for them to either make software, test software, offer ideas, or tell other geeks that software is needed


Full List of Talks | HOPE



"Full list of talks"

go to the 30th audio clip

about 1/3 down the long list is
"The Freedom Box. How to Reclaim Privacy on the Web" by James Vasile

you have to wait till :40 after you start it or it'll be silent. It's a long clip and questions from the audience starts at 24:02

[Rick V]

Can I still get pr0n?

[RoninLB]

i didn't hear that asked

[id10t]

Very good book (available Free and online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/ ) called "Little Brother" that is worth reading, contains a similar subject.

In the book, a ubiquitous game console with wifi and mesh networking capabilities gets its own Linux distro. Ad-hoc networks, rings of trust, everything being encrypted. Various sites realize that the fact that there is encrypted traffic throws up a "not normal, investigate it" flag, so they start encrypting *everything* - ad requests, etc. Suddenly the encrypted communications aren't sticking out like a sore thumb.

Same concept is doable in a populated area, a web of trust or 3, ssh tunnels, vpns, ad-hoc wireless networks using cantennas for long range, etc. And of course there is always packet radio (IP over HAM) for much longer range communications.