
A Censorship-Resistant Web - panarky
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/uncensor
======
jeremymims
Wikileaks is like Napster. It's a single point that can be taken down.

The future of "leaking" or whistleblowing will look much more like the
bittorrent sites that came after it.

The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point
was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with. Wikileaks has
actively attempted to prevent people from being physically hurt or killed by
classified leaks by working through journalists and factcheckers at newspapers
and magazines to redact some information. However, mere embarrassment isn't a
quality standard by which to withhold information from the public.

Other groups won't necessarily be so discerning. The governments trying to
prevent Wikileaks from operating will ultimately be faced with much more
distributed and fragmented leaking sites.

~~~
joe_the_user
_The governments don't realize it yet, but having Wikileaks as a focal point
was a benefit because it could presumably be negotiated with._

I am not sure that government doesn't realize this. I suspect that government
has to talk as if Wikileaks is the devil for it's own credibility regardless
of the benefit they might perceive they're deriving from the situation or how
much worse the situation might turn out for them later.

In fact, having a fixed enemy to freeze and discredit is immensely useful.
Makes you wonder why they haven't found Bin Laden yet...

...Perhaps Wikileaks will exist forever with Julian Assange continually
shunted from country to country while all manner of intelligence agencies
think-up new ways to discredit and/or control him. Or Perhaps he can just join
Osama "somewhere in Pakistan"... well, it would make a fine movie...

~~~
notahacker
Whilst talking tough and doing nothing is probably the most sensible position
as well as the default, I don't think "the governments" are sufficiently co-
ordinated to have a coherent strategy for dealing with centralised
whistleblowers.

I'm sure there are some agencies motivated to get carefully selected (and
quite possibly false) helpful material "leaked" onto Wikileaks whilst other
agencies sincerely do what they can to try to get the operation shut down. Net
result: a huge amount of attention is drawn to Wikileaks by leaning on their
support network _despite_ the relative lack of dynamite and large amount of
noise in what is leaked, but some of the most ardent supporters of government
policy amongst the general public are too angry with the very existence of the
website to consider reading it...

~~~
joe_the_user
Caveat: I don't really know the relation between State Department, Defense
Department, intelligence agencies, lobbyists and who-the-fuck-knows _.. but to
follow my earlier random speculation..._

Sure the various agencies as a whole aren't well coordinated or able to act
against the present whistleblowers.

But hypothesis would be that the smaller-groups-that-matter are coordinated
enough. And they're the ones whose secrets matter too. They're the "historical
actors" and big bureaucracies are just guff. Sure, the bureaucracies are
following their standard procedures and so-forth.

And yes, creating a large mob angry at Wikileaks is useful. I'm sure we can
use that for something - we've got some copyright infringement to stop...

------
jdp23
It's ambitious, but between Tor, Freenet, and other building blocks there's a
lot to start with. Seems like a great Summer of Code project.

~~~
joe_the_user
Freenet is great as an uncensorable web-like-system. But it's kind of
monolithic.

It would be nice to build a freenet-like system out of modular parts. I think
Tribble has the beginnings of something like this. <http://www.tribler.org/>
It overlays a "gossip network" on top of the bittorent protocol.

I'd see the ideal uncensorable Internet as consisting of _fall-backs_ from the
ordinary protocols and processes. If the user can't find the DNS of a site,
they look using an alternative dns system. If they can't find the IP, they use
something like Tribble to find the thing.

This would be done as a browser plugin.

Another piece would be to have particular authors embed their public keys into
whatever text they write. A user could search with Tribble or whatever for
more works by that author out of outside of ordinary web search. Such a system
would verify authorship and "source" without the need for a centralized
certificating authority.

------
dododo
this reminds me of ross anderson's eternity service from ~1997:

    
    
      The Internet was designed to provide a communications channel that is as  
      resistant to denial of service attacks as human ingenuity can make it. In this note,
      we propose the construction of a storage medium with similar properties. The 
      basic idea is to use redundancy and scattering techniques to replicate data
      across a large set of machines (such as the Internet), and add anonymity 
      mechanisms to drive up the cost of selective service denial attacks. The 
      detailed design of this service is an interesting scientific problem, and is not 
      merely academic: the service may be vital in safeguarding individual rights 
      against new threats posed by the spread of electronic publishing.
    

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/eternity/eternity.html>

an implementation of which can be found here (also from similar time):

<http://www.cypherspace.org/eternity/>

------
rmc
This is inspired by the recent Wikileaks censoring, however it doesn't solve
the problem they had. This scheme seems to make it hard for someone to
interstate another site, however that wasn't wikileaks' problem, their problem
was that people were able to shut down their hosting.

~~~
gbhn
Another big problem in the Wikileaks case is the ability of adversaries to
make it much harder for supporters to give them money or other forms of
support.

~~~
rmc
I wonder do wikileaks accept bitcoins. And if so, does they then sell those
bitcoins for dollars/euro to raise money?

------
aristus
A cool thing about this design is that it also allows for redundant,
independent internet archives. But some of those pieces look like they are
interlocking instead of stacked. I also don't quite get how you can assume the
existence of a non-evil, non-coercible certificate authority.

------
some1else
We could start by making a browser plugin that lets users report suspected
censorship, and provide alternate domains or ip's for the site.

~~~
drdaeman
Replacing one authority (ICANN and their subsidized registrars) with another
(plugin authors) is not a real solution.

With automated submissions, scammers of all sorts won't take long, trying
their best to report that google.com is censored and real Google is now at
xxxbestsearchenginexxx.net. A sufficiently large botnet operation is hardly
distinguishable from valid mass reports.

On the other hand, censors would also be very happy to submit thousands of
completely fake reports to give system some hard time trying to find what's
really going on. They may go as far as creating WikiLeaks-looking fake sites,
containing bogus dummy papers instead of the troublesome content (so having
digital signatures on site contents is a must).

Building a system, capable to successfully withstand such attacks is extremely
hard.

And average Aunt Tillie won't install any complicated software or use anything
with UI much harder than "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server
at wikileaks.com. This site seem to be under the US government censorship, so
please click here for the list of mirrors." Which seems to be inherently
incompatible with actually required level of security and censorship-
resistance.

------
borism
If you're reading this, care and have some spare bandwidth, may I suggest you
set up Tor relay? Because you know, Tor wouldn't be possible without people
and organisations willing to volunteer. The setup is pretty trivial with
Vidalia UI and UPnP router, and you don't have to be using Tor yourself.

~~~
igravious
I have 2 problems with Tor relays even though I am essentially (strongly) in
favour of the idea of distributing our information load to protect privacy.

1) I am a student, I use the bandwidth of the campus - could my position as a
student be hurt by some of the material that flows through Tor? What I am
saying here is that really one should not run a Tor relay unless you are
paying for your own bandwidth.

2) I am uneasy about what kind of information I might inadvertently relay.
Some of the information could be very objectionable, very unethical, downright
criminal, couldn't it? I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used
100% by victims of oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable
types would use it too and I don't want to be a part of that.

How would you respond to these observations / queries ?

~~~
jamesbritt
"I would love to think that my Tor relay is being used 100% by victims of
oppressed regimes but I have a feeling other less desirable types would use it
too and I don't want to be a part of that."

How else could it work, though?

If it is indeed anonymous then a) you have no way of knowing to what ends it
is serving, and b) it is eminently usable by people doing very objectionable,
very unethical, downright criminal things.

But that's the _only_ way it could be of true value to victims of oppressed
regimes, etc.

You'll have to weigh the net gain or loss.

~~~
borism
2) by being Tor relay, well, you relay traffic for other Tor users. If you
find some content objectionable (be it child pornography or cnn.com) you can
block that content from being reachable to your relay with other tools (ip/dns
blacklisting, content filtering etc.). Your relay will then be relaying
content you haven't blocked.

1) ownership of bandwidth is a gray area. I run my Tor relay on the ISP link I
pay for, but that doesn't necessarily mean I own the link or it's alright by
ISP's ToS. But as long as you're not using most up/downlink 24x7 (not possible
on most home links due to asymmetry anyway), I think ISPs won't bother
counter-measuring you.

~~~
jamesbritt
" If you find some content objectionable (be it child pornography or cnn.com)
you can block that content from being reachable to your relay with other tools
"

If you can read the content passing through your Tor relay then you see when
there is discontent in oppressed country Foo, and you can alert the leaders to
crush the rebellion.

I certainly hope that people who resort to Tor to avoid detection are smart
enough to use encryption.

