Censorship

Censorship

The Egypt Use Case: Publishing to the World

A. Ghareiba at the FSW2011: "We collected some 60G of material like high-definition video [..] while there was no Internet to one place that had the connection, because the ISP was not shut down, because the stock exchange relied on the ISP."

This is to say, in a government crackdown situation you may have to expect that non-critical infrastructure will be attacked, filtered, shut down. In this case the stock exchange needed to have its Internet, and luckily the activists in Egypt therefore too had access to the Internet – at least sufficiently to upload materials to the rest of the world.

In future this may become less easy to do, so it is a good idea to design an infrastructure for freedom in a way that it encompasses everyday commerce and profanity and becomes difficult to censor.

The Egypt Use Case: Virtual Freedom of Assembly

In "A Federated Context Model for Describing Social Activity Across Devices" Georgios Gionis et al of webinos.org suggest: "There is also potential for abuse by authorities, who might try to track associations between people to counteract activist groups, thereby threatening freedom of assembly."

Should the Internet no longer be available, Jan Schallaboeck of W3C suggests we should "switch android phones to revolutionary mesh mode." GNUnet provides an ad-hoc mesh networking transport. secushare plans to use it in parallel with traditional Internet.

In the ideal case, Ghareiba would like to no longer need a phone line or Internet connection to defend his democratic rights, just a power plug should be enough, and should that power plug be disconnected, a solar panel would do.

Civil Society Principles

Markus Sabadello of Project Danube in "A Federated Social Web for Peace:" "For a global civil society to truly work, both the architectural structure and the governance mechanisms of its communication channels must be based on civil society principles itself. [..] the main promise of the Federated Social Web – in addition to the obvious advantages of improved privacy, control and resistance to manipulation – will be a network structure that deep at its core resembles civil society and is therefore a powerful instrument for a more peaceful world."

That's why we cut out the servers and emulate human interaction peer to peer.

Well?

Secushare acknowledges these statements and offers a censorship resistant publishing platform embedded in everyday social interactions, thus even harder to trace and censor, without becoming a threat to society.

It's neither federated nor the web, but that only makes it better.

See also the design documents of gnunet-fs for additional censorship-resistant sharing of information.

Top