Why Should I donate?

Recently the Bush administration argued in court that they have a legal right to read and analyze all emails (and other electronically transmitted information) without needing a court order or to notify the person being surveilled. They argue that most information on the internet (including email) is sent in an unencrypted and plain-text format; and therefore the sender never intended the contents to be private. The example they use is that of a postcard where the sender knows that since their text is exposed it can potentially be read by other people besides the intended recipient.

What will my donation fund?

There are few secure alternatives to plain-text email. Unlike a letter writer who could choose a sealed envelope over a postcard plain-text email offers no such privacy. More importantly, if a government body can read your thoughts, they can also potentially censor them before the letter reaches the intended destination. These subversive actions are already the status quo among many countries who do not embrace ideas of personal freedom much less the freedom of information. I am starting this campaign to fund alternative distribution channels for our private thoughts. Specifically, if we can’t find a widely supported means for sending and reading encrypted mail then we need to find a way to make the transmission of the letters private. We need to find a way to enclose our emails in a virtual sealed envelope!

Fortunately, there are a few software mavens, actively working on alternatives to the “postcard” modality of information exchange. One alternative is called a “Darknet”, which is a private virtual network of users who connect to other trusted nodes often times anonymously. These Darknets are used to route information requests through a series of hard to trace hops to ensure that data makes it to and from the user’s computer uncensored. Freenet is extends the idea of a Darknet into a virtually private internet, where people can read and publish content anonymously and without the fear of retaliation.

What is Freenet?

The official Freenet website ( http://freenetproject.org/ ) describes the project this way:

Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.

Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content.

The network can be used in a number of different ways and isn't restricted to just sharing files like other peer-to-peer networks. It acts more like an Internet within an Internet. For example Freenet can be used for:

• Publishing websites or 'freesites'
• Communicating via message boards
• Content distribution

Unlike many cutting edge projects, Freenet long ago escaped the science lab, it has been downloaded by over 2 million users since the project started, and it is used for the distribution of censored information all over the world including countries such as China and the Middle East. Ideas and concepts pioneered in Freenet have had a significant impact in the academic world. Our 2000 paper "Freenet: A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System" was the most cited computer science paper of 2000 according to Citeseer, and Freenet has also inspired papers in the worlds of law and philosophy. Ian Clarke, Freenet's creator and project coordinator, was selected as one of the top 100 innovators of 2003 by MIT's Technology Review magazine.