I've always loved the ideals and design of Freenet for what it does, but the main issues I always ran into when I'd check it out were that discoverability was horrible and then once you did manage to dig into things and find content it was usually stuff I wouldn't want to find to begin with. That's left a lot of bad impressions on people I think, and caused it to have a reputation for only illegal things on it.
It makes me wonder about use cases for tools like freenet, tor, etc. Espionage of some sort comes to mind and the need to deliver a message from sender to receiver without identifying any participants . Otherwise there is some other implicit recognition that anonymity can be productive.<p>Anonymity clearly changes how individuals communicate, but the research I know of tends to focus more on how people like to behave badly and mischievously when there is no known reputation or name associated with the consequences of a action.<p>Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows the ability to obscure identity, however thin or unsophisticated, elicits changes in behavior. I highly doubt the producers of these tools construct them with the goal of inviting mayhem in mind. Regardless, the more anonymous a data transfer is, the less social pressure there is to communicate within certain permitted boundaries.<p>Outside of a authority point of view, there's also the potential for creativity and free association related to anonymity. If one feels you won't be judged because of saying something, you might open up.
When I was young I thinkn internet is freedom. These day it is more of a control device by the state.<p>In the older days, you can hide from the state. These day you can’t. Your day to day activities are recorded.<p>China is just one example. And they are not the only one.
>A recent court case in the Peel Region of Ontario, Canada R. v. Owen, 2017 ONCJ 729 (CanLII), illustrated that Law Enforcement do in fact have a presence, after Peel Regional Police, located who had been downloading illegal material on the Freenet network.<p>I haven't looked into the architecture of Freenet, but would someone be able to give a quick rundown of how this is possible? I was always surprised there weren't more well established, long-form, human rights blogs on Freenet but maybe there are security concerns I'm not aware of.