From Superhighway to Fabulous Freeway?

Hari Kunzru reports on Freenet — a new development which could revive free speech on the Internet.

In the wake of file-sharing software like Napster and Gnutella comes Freenet, a file sharing protocol which looks set to intensify the battle between free speech activists and pro-censorship governments, by providing a new means to publish and distribute information anonymously online. Freenet renders obsolete most of the methods that copyright holders and law enforcement agencies have developed to clamp down on the distribution of information, and its programmers claim that its decentralised architecture makes it far more robust and attack-resistant than the DNS-reliant World Wide Web.

Unlike the Web, Freenet has no centralised namespace management at all. Information is inserted into the system tagged by a key (usually some kind of description of the information), and can be retrieved by anyone using this key, much like a Web URL. However, unlike the Web, a piece of Freenet information is not stored at a fixed location. Instead it travels through the entire distributed system, being stored, replicated, cached and distributed according to demand. Popular documents will replicate themselves across the system, eliminating the too-frequent Web situation when demand for a piece of data such as the Starr report causes server crashes, bottlenecks and brownouts. Conversely, unpopular documents will fall down the rankings and eventually be deleted, freeing up space for information people want to access.

Freenet is based on an open protocol, and all software and source code is downloadable at http://freenet.sourceforge.net. It is relatively simple to set up. A Freenet participant installs a small piece of server software and allocates some hard disk space to Freenet information storage. The Freenet protocol manages what flows to what node, and its programmers claim that this makes it almost impossible to probe the system to find out what is stored where at any given time. Furthermore, such a probe will actually cause the target information to replicate itself on other nodes, an ‘immune’ reaction much closer to the free-speech ideal of automatic ‘routing round censorship’ than the current situation on the Web, in which activists have to mirror target pages — like etoy or the zundelsite — to other servers.

Unlike Internet packets, which are tagged with both source and destination IP addresses, packets sent across Freenet are anonymous — both to publish and read. Ian Clarke, the Irish programmer who set up the Freenet project, is at pains to point out that this doesn’t offer true anonymity at the point of upload, but used in conjunction with anonymous remailers like Mixmaster, even ‘non trivial’ threats to security can be countered. It is, he says "virtually impossible to forcibly remove a piece of information from Freenet." Clarke is optimistic about its potential. "Freenet is still in its development stage, but already we have received a fantastic amount of interest. Politicians don’t seem to understand why free speech and freedom of information are important, whether on the Internet or elsewhere. It is reassuring that people understand the need for something like Freenet.".

Freenet for windows,unix and mac, protocol source code and developer information are all downloadable at http://freenet.sourceforge.net

Hari Kunzru <hari AT metamute.com>