Freenet

:For other uses, see Freenet (disambiguation)

Controversy

The same technology which allows the oppressed to communicate with a large group, without either the publisher or the readers' identities being revealed, can also allow controversial information such as drug related information or child pornography to be made available to anyone. Freenet's founders point out that only with true anonymity comes true freedom of speech, and that what they view as the beneficial uses of Freenet outweigh its negative uses. Due to the nature of Freenet a typical user may unknowingly host this sort of information, which may hypothetically make them subject to severe civil and criminal penalties. Freenet attempts to prevent this through "plausible deniability", preventing the user himself from knowing what's on his own node and making it difficult to determine if a piece of information is in any given node without causing the distribution of that piece of information throughout the network to change in the process. No court cases have tested any of this to date.

Related Topics:
Child pornography - Plausible deniability

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Some anonymous friend-to-friend (F2F) networks do allow you to control what kind of files your friends exchange with your node in order to stop them from exchanging files you disapprove of but Freenet's "deniability" defence would not apply to users of these systems.

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F2F prevents random people from proving that your IP address can effectively be used to get some controversial files. Freenet does not offer this protection because for efficiency reasons (path shortening) some random nodes are allowed to connect directly to your node, thus exchanging files faster, but thus knowing your IP and thus being able to prove that specific files can be obtained from your computer. However, due to Freenet's "plausible deniability" and the way in which Freenet redistributes files among nodes, one cannot prove that those files were placed there by the node owner or that the node owner knows what they are.

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