Freenet
Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to store information, and has a suite of free software for working with this data store. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defines Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech with strong anonymity protection.
Freenet was originally a computer system or network that provided public access to digital resources and community information, including personal communications, through modem dialup via the public switched telephone network. The concept originated in the health sciences to provide online help for medical patients. With the development of the Internet free-net systems became the first to offer limited Internet access to the general public to support the non-profit community work. The Cleveland Free-Net (cleveland.freenet.edu), founded in 1986, was the pioneering community network of this kind in the world.
Freenet works by storing small encrypted snippets of content distributed on the computers of its users and connecting only through intermediate computers which pass on requests for content and sending them back without knowing the contents of the full file, similar to how routers on the Internet route packets without knowing anything about files—except with caching, a layer of strong encryption, and without reliance on centralized structures. This allows users to publish anonymously or retrieve various kinds of information. Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000.
Since Version 0.7 (2008), it offers two modes of operation: a darknet mode in which it connects only to friends, and an opennet-mode in which it connects to any other Freenet user. Both modes can be used together. When a user changes to pure darknet operation, Freenet becomes very difficult to detect from the outside. The transport layer created for the darknet mode allows communication over restricted routes as commonly found in mesh networks, as long as these connections follow a small-world structure.
The distributed datastore of Freenet is used by many third-party programs and plugins to provide microblogging and media sharing, anonymous, decentralised version tracking, blogging, a generic web of trust for decentralized spam resistance, Shoeshop for using Freenet over Sneakernet, and many more.
Freenet has always been free software, but for most of its history it required users to install proprietary Java software. In 2011, this problem was solved and Freenet can now also work with the free OpenJDK Java system.
The application Frost allows anonymous communication and posting board using the Freenet network. (abandoned due to abuse, see FMS and FLIP instead)
Police plants own computers in Freenet, log IPs, makes arrest
- Police plants own computers in Freenet, log IPs, makes arrest
23 November, 2015
Freenet, a P2P network routing traffic across multiple nodes to hide people’s IP when filesharing, and often cited by the media as part of the dark web, appears to have been broken by law enforcement.
Court records related to Paul Bradley Meagher, a University of North Dakota police officer arrested for downloading child porn from the “anonymous” peer to peer network Freenet, reveal that the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation had been running an undercover operation in the network since 2011, planting their own nodes inside Freenet to be able to log people’s IPs and trace the final destination of users downloading illegal material.
The Dakota student news site relates how Investigating Officer Jesse Smith managed to get hold of Paul Bradley’s laptop still switched on and running Freenet on the Wifi network, law enforcement discovered child porn images during the preview before seizing the laptop, arresting the suspect, whom, at that point refused to talk with the investigators. Paul Bradley has now been charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography and can be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison for each count, facing a possible 50 years in jail.
Freenet network jSite
The Grand Forks Herald from North Dakota cites detective Jesse Smith in the affidavit as admitting to her department running nodes in Freenet to be able to track people downloading files included in a list of known child porn file hashes from the police database.
Unsurprisingly, when a journalist contacted the Bureau of Criminal Investigation of North Dakota they declined to make any comment about the story, so little is known about how they track people. It could be because Freenet has far less nodes than Tor, or because Freenet code has some bug (it requires Java to run).
With further research I found that the ICAC Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, in 2014 ran a Freenet workshop for law enforcement to present what they called the “Black Ice Project“. Quoted on their website as “This session will describe the basic functioning of Freenet, how persons exchanging child abuse material, the system’s vulnerabilities and how the Black Ice project exploits them.”
https://hacker10.com/internet-anonymity/police-plants-own-computers-in-freenet-makes-arrest/
References:
- Child predators use technology, but law enforcement does too
Nov. 18, 2015
- Bail set for UPD officer
November 18, 2015
https://dakotastudent.com/7191/news/bail-set-for-upd-officer/
Plausible Deniability
One of the central ideas in Freenet is plausible deniability. All files stored on your Freenet node are encrypted (each with a separate key), and you have no way of knowing what they contain without access to the decryption keys which are contained in the addresses.
Of course, the decryption keys, which are contained in links to the files, may be publically posted on some other site - they have to be if the site creator wants people to visit their site. But if you've never had knowledge of that link, which is very plausible if there are thousands of Freenet sites, you can't be expected to know what is contained in the encrypted files in your Freenet node.
See Also
Official links
- The Freenet Project
- The Official FAQ
- A Freenet Help Site/wiki
- A presentation of the projects to make a Wiki over Freenet possible.
Freenet proxy on TOR hidden service (about 50% uptime)