Can Web Sites Go Offshore For Free Speech?

invoke asks: "All the recent stories about Web pages being yanked for various supposed violations of DMCA make me worry that I may inadvertently irritate some large corporation. What I am seeing now in America and the EU suggests that I would most likely find my Internet connection terminated with no real recourse, causing me no end of hassle. I can't afford to lose my connectivity, as I run several domains off my static IP. Therefore, I'm looking for a safe-harbor solution for hosting a 'vanilla' free speech site. I'm not intending to host warez or serialz, just stuff that might irritate people-with-money. Any suggestions?"

Free speech is still a pipe dream

The ideal of free speech, as desirable as it may seem to all of us, is in the real world nothing more than a pipe dream which those in power want to convince us we have. True free speech has never existed, and will probably never exist under the current socioeconomic models of today, in which aggressive competition is the force that shapes our society and the lives we lead in it.

The capitalist system which dominates the world is based upon older social systems such as feudalism, and inherits from them a kind of "caste" system in which money replaces birth as the indicator of rank. The only real difference is that there is an illusion of opportunity which is deliberately fostered by those at the top in order to keep those at the bottom happy. After all if you think you might be able to rise up the social ladder through hard work and skill, then you are going to be content with your lot, believing better things are around the corner. This is the basis for the "American dream".

The struggle to gain status and power within the system is an aggressive and competitive one - there is less room at the top than there are people trying to rise there. This creates a climate where backstabbing, slander and other forms of socioeconomic rape become accepted and acceptable means to gain something over others, either pushing yourself up or your rivals down.

Whilst this infighting serves those at the top, keeping the masses busy fighting each other rather than challenging them, things like free speech are a danger to them. Their positions of power are based on an intricate web of money, power, reputation and connections, and annoyances like public opinion can topple even the mightiest giant.

So rather than have their positions exposed to the free speech of the public, they will instead fight using their considerable resources to quosh it, preferrably using pre-emptive legislative strikes. We see this happening across the Western world at the moment with laws like the UCITA and so on. So surely the obvious choice is to go offshore, outside of national laws?

While this may work for a while, the globalist coterie of people in power aren't themselves tied to any particular nation. Sooner or later they will find a way to pressure national and international bodies into "harmomising" international laws or some other excuse that will involve extending the reach of anti-free speech laws.

So in the short term this may work as a solution to oppresive national laws, but it's only a matter of time before legislation catches up with you wherever you are.

Re:Offshore ISP?

Remember there are no international ships. If your
ship has an American reg US law still applies.

IANAL

The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

The "Radio Caroline" Solution

Radio Caroline was a very popular pirate radio station in Britain, for a lot of years, precicely because it pandered to nobody. It was parked outside the 10 mile limit, putting it in international waters, where national law simply doesn't apply.

To do the same, or something similar, with a web server demands some additional resources, but is actually not that different in practice.

Instead of being parked outside of the physical legal domain, you now have to be parked outside of the virtual legal domain.

What does this mean, in practice? Using "pirate" IP numbers, a "pirate" DNS, and (most importantly) NO logical connection.

If there is no logical point of connection, then there is nothing to shut off. There is also no easy way of tracking where the server physically is.

In short, you must be able to intercept packets for your server at arbritary points on the physical network, and inject synthesised packets also anywhere in the physical network.

(By "anywhere", I mean more than 1 place, and the more places the better.)

Tunneling to a large number of proxies (ALL of whom have the same vhost IP/name) would be one way.

Another, less legal, way would be to borrow the same idea as used in DDOS attacks, but install a distributed proxy service instead.

A third method would be to extend the Gnutella protocol to support anycast proxying. (Essentially Gnutella is 9/10ths there, so this wouldn't be overly difficult.)

A fourth, -definitely- illegal and strongly NOT recommended method (but perhaps the most water-tight) would be to use one of the first two methods with injected routes. By this, I mean transmit valid BGP4 and/or RIP2 packets to a random set of routers, of which at least one is connected to each proxy. The injected routes would create randomly and continuously shifting paths to each proxy, making it much more difficult to figure out where anything is. Combine this with a randomly shifting IP address, and it becomes impossible to block or trace. Individual sysops could remove proxies, if ordered to or if not approved. However, with no burden on any one proxy and no continuous load along any one path, it's unlikely any given proxy would ever be found, or even objected to, if it was. (Most computer-literate people are closet Robin Hoods, whether they'll admit to it or not. Provided something is not interfering with legitamate use of resources, is unlikely to bring the Wrath of God down on their heads, and doesn't compromise "security" (read: bring their prawn collection to the attention of the media), most sys admins are likely to decide it's more hastle than it's worth... ...and bookmark the website for future "reference".

All these methods boil down to The Golden Rule of Real Security: DON'T put your eggs in one basket, and keep moving the baskets. It royally buggers up the egg-smashers.

Of course, this works both ways

Which means that there's nothing stopping, say, AOL Time Warner from paying someone to sink your data haven in international waters, slaughtering everyone on board in the process. And there are many hired guns who may be willing to do such a job; if one of the South African mercenary contractors won't do it then surely a pirate crew can be found in South East Asia who are not averse to doing a bit of extra work and making a few hundred thousand on the side.

Basic Problem of Connection

The problem here is that the "offshore" site (non-US, non-EU) must connnect to the rest of the world through some physical connection. That connection is most likely provided by a peering arrangement with one of the global telecomm providers. And there is a major asymmetry of power between the smaller country and the {US,EU}.

So when your posting annoys someone with serious clout, they have a quite chat with the State Department and the interconnecting telecomm player. They in turn have private chats with their peers, and your site disappears. The alternative is for, say, voice service into that country to "stop working" for a few days, until the point gets across.

IMHO the best choice is to set up your own site with a local or regional ISP in your home country, get some legal advice, and fight the battles you need to fight. That's the only way to prevail in the long run.

sPh

Re:Might not work

I don't think the purpose of this Ask is to avoid all responsibility, it's to avoid having the ISP pull the plug at the first sniff of a libel or copyright suit against *them*.

Pervasive Distribution

Is your only hope to escape any censorship with impunity.

Join freenet and host a freenet server. Then, your information will be distributed via many hosts in a dynamic way.

Use your static server as an index into the freenet content. Let people know what is out there, but dont provide it explicitly on your server(s).

Otherwise, no matter where you are, or what you do, you piss off the wrong people and your site is history. If your lucky that would be the end of it, if not, welcome to big fines and jail time.

well, actually..

yes, they were in there, but not in the manner they're used today.

The Congress shall have power.. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

In other words, the constitution only includes patents and copyright to a reasonable, non-unlimited extent, and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". This isn't what we're complaining about. This is a good thing. What we're complaining about is patents and copyrights used as weapons for corporations to silence individuals, something that was added much, much later, far after the first amendment bits.

What was originally there is more or less to _protect_ people-- i.e. to stop someone from taking the work of others at the expense of the original creator, such as burning 3000 copies of "Dre 2001" and selling them on the street, in which case Dre is in a very real way failing to recieve money that was his due, because 3000 people who would otherwise have bought the album from Dre bought them from the guy on the street. Making the case that the patent/copyright stuff in the constitution was intended to prevent people from taking ideas and concepts from a work and using those ideas and concepts to create a new, independent work, as is done in the case of a parody [slashdot.org] or the music of Negativland [negativland.com].. well, that doesn't seem to use the same spirit as the parts of the U.S. constitution, seeing as a new work as such would be progress of useful art, and the original creator suffers no loss.

You'll also notice the bits in the original constitution do not contradict free speech, really, and i see NOTHING in there to support the idea of preventing the spread of information-- i.e. preventing information about a technology from being spread. The idea behind the patents was originally to encourage the spread of information-- that in order to convince someone to allow science to progress, they would tell the world how their process worked, and in return would be granted a limited-time monopoly on that process. The idea that something like the DMCA could prevent someone from spreading information they found independantly about a process-- say, cyberpatrol's encryption scheme-- is completely antithetical to the original idea of a patent and what the constitution says, even if the information about said process is in a language other than English (say, C++..)

You'll also note the "for limited times" bit. Current copyright/patent laws extend far, far past the useful lifespan of the ideas they encompass, and the lifespan of a copyright seems to get longer every time that the date of the expiration of Mickey Mouse's copyright comes within the forseeable future. You think it will _ever_ be legal for me to distribute a Legend of Zelda 1 ROM, no matter how long i live and no matter how many years have passed since Nintendo has gotten a penny from that game? Ha.

So yeh, copyrights and patents do predate free speech in U.S. law to an extent, but not in any manner that is antithetical to the idea of free speech.

Re:Set Up Your Own Web Server Or Go Offshore

I would recommend that you get a high speed DSL/Cable connection to your home and use one of the free DNS providers to ensure that people can always reach your IP from a domain.

I think that going offshore/self-hosting encourages a false sense of security. It seems like you have solved the problem but you haven't. This encourages apathy because the problem seems to go away. It seems like you have freedom of speech when you really don't.

You can still be shut down by your DSL service provider in the same way that your web host provider can shut you down. Nothing has changed.

Remember how in the old days, the internet was designed to discourage spam/commercial activity. When you got internet access, you promise not to do a bunch of things. One of them is spam so let's use spam as an example. The penalty for sending spam is that you get your service pulled and your account terminated. Your service provider had the same kind of contract with it's service provider. If your service provider allows it's customers to spam then it's service provider can cut it off. This continues down the line to the backbones. They have the same kind of contract. The agreement states that they will exchange data as long as there is no spam. The penalty for a backbone allowing it's customers to spam is that the other backbones will cut them off, they will not exchange data.

Remember the Spam King and the Ageis network? The Spam King became his own service provider connected directly to the Ageis backbone. It seemed like an ideal solution. The problem was that all the other backbones threatened to cut off Ageis' access to their backbones. Ageis was forced to pull the plug on the Spam King even though they didn't want to. If the other backbones had cut them off, they would have gone out of business.

Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go.

If you don't think that this can be done, remember that until very recently, the US phone networks were prohibited from connecting to the Cuban phone network so you couldn't easily make a phone call from the US to Cuba. Yes, I know that the internet has obvious ways to route around this kind of block but big governments can put a lot of pressure on service providers.

Remember that service providers are corporations. Like it or not, they are amoral. Their loyalty is to shareholders not to your freedom of speech. If the CEO of a corporation puts your freedom of speech above shareholder value, he can be sued and he will certainly loose his job.

Ideas for anonymous publishing

I wrote a discussion on how one might do anonymous/untraceable publishing on the internet:

http://jonathanclark.com/diary/anonpub/ [jonathanclark.com]

I wasn't aware of freedom net [zeroknowledge.com] at the time, but they use many of the same ideas. They do not do publishing (i.e. only outgoing connections) mainly for fear of legal problems.

Another method I've seen tossed around is to use redirecting proxy servers where URLs look like this:

http://site1.com/XXX
where XXX decrypts to -> http://site2.com/YYY and
YYY decrypts to http://site3.com/actual_content.html

The only trouble is getting people to run the proxy servers.

One other idea I have played around with is to use spoofied ping packets to transfer content semi-anonymously. It work by the connecting party somehow requesting the content and the posting their IP address. Then you, the server, send it to some random machine on the internet inside of a ping packet with a spoofed return address to them. This can be used to make the chain of computers between you and them very long - also making it travel through countries that are hard to get search warrents.
The main problem is making the initial request, but that could be done with a Gnutella like network.
The other problem here is the receiving computer needs to somehow specifiy which packets weren't received (because ping is lossy).

food for thought...

Re:as mentioned by Bruce Sterling

I assume you mean "Distraction". I enjoyed it pretty much; it's not everyday you read a SF novel whose "hero" is a ... political campaign organizer. ;^) Also, I enjoyed some of the technology described, such as the self-organizing distributed-labor auto-building houses (sounds weird, but is cool), and of course the throw-away cell phones. Ah, a link to Amazon, perhaps: right here [amazon.com]. Remember: you don't have to buy it there...

Move your site to South Africa

If you're willing to sacrifice a bit of speed, then why not move your web sites to South Africa.
Here are a few reasons:

1) AFAIK there are few laws here regarding the Internet related things. Child pornography is the only one they come down hard on.
2) Even if there were, our Law Enforcement groups are so useless that the only crime rate that is on the decline are traffic violations, which they are coming down hard on.
3) Free speech is very well protected here, especially in relation to our political past.
4) There are a few companies that will host your domain and give you self administration for a very low cost - for less than US$50 per month for 10Mb hosting. This price is dropping as our currency declines along with the situation in Zimbabwe.

The reason I say you'll sacrifice speed is because we still have a monopolistic Telco, and bandwith is _EXTREMELY_ expensive. It will change in the next fews years though...

Re:Is offshore the answer?

For the record, copyright and patents are part of the original constitution. Free speech did not show up until constitution rev. 1.1.

Depends on content.

Most smaller countries would probably bend over if you posted something that really bothered some big enough company.

Your best bet is to find a host who agrees with your views.
Second best, find someone who might not agree with you, but likes to be trouble to the same guys who might not like your content.

Anti-MS: Post it on /.
Anti-Linux: Go MSN
Anti-[generic US company]: Post it in France
Anti-$cientology: Germany
etc.

Remember that *your* powerful enemies has *their* enemies too. They might not be your friends, but they could be your allies. Just be prepared to move when the wind changes...

Re:Offshore ISP?

You could base it here:

http://www.freedomship.com/

(a project to build a mobile libertarian haven
disguised as an overgrown cruise ship)

Offshore ISP?

I wonder if setting up a satellite-based ISP on a boat or something in international waters would work. Basically a big floating server farm, with high-speed satellite links.

If the Simpsons has taught me anything (and it has), it's that anything is legal in international waters :)

But seriously. It would have the benefits of being mobile and outside the jurisdiction of everyone. Of course, you would probably have some weather-related problems, plus the fact that you might have to "go down with the server"

Off-shore won't work.

Even if you set up a site in Cuba, it does not matter.

If you reside, or have asets in a country that will recognize the rulings from a country that makes it illegal, then they can take those asets.

A court can grant juridiction over a website because it is targeted to an area that they have jurisdiction. Since it is then intended to cause the harm in an area that the court has jurisdiction, you can be sued in that court.

If you don't appear, you will be defaulted. If there are assets that can be reached by the court, even though the website can't be, you lose.

If in Boston, you have your death ray satelite kill someone in Boston, they still will arrest you in Boston. They don't have to have jurisdiction in space.

Re:Offshore ISP?

That's why you register with one of the flag of convience countries. You know those little Carribean nations that do little but serve as banking havens and such (the Caymans jump to mind).

Or, even better, with a country that is about to change governments!

Is offshore the answer?

I don't think that offshore is the answer. The Internet is a GLOBAL community. I think that big business is just that, BUSINESS. They are in business to make money and anyone that thay percieve is attempting to take away their fair share of the pie is subject to their intervention. How do we create a global community that is not subject to big business intervention? I propose a VPI. (Virtual Private Internet) Has anybody done this yet? Maybe Big Business is reading this right now and will steal the idea. Free speech is a constitutional right. Copyright is not. The only way to prove copyright is with sufficient documentation and witnesses to stand up in a court of law. I declare this message copywritten in my name. That is all the notice I need to put on this work to copyright it according to US law. International copyrights are a different matter. Now if anyone tries to use any of the words in this post I could try to sue them. (maybe Merriam Webster should sue the entire english speaking world) It won't stand up in a court of law, but I could still try. Once again I think a VPI would be the way to go. "hackers" could support "hackers" and exclude "big business" from infringing on that "net". W3 was a good idea. How about a new consrtium? VPI1?