Comment Re:Soon this law will be useless (Score 2, Insightful) 376
How do you block Freenet? Seriously, how do you block it and not other services?
If Freenet is banned, the government can collect the address of every "opennet" Freenet node in a matter of hours. Then it's a question of finding the "darknet" nodes. A simple heuristic will probably catch most of them: recursively look for any address that has at least three long-lived, encrypted, two-way UDP streams to known or suspected Freenet nodes. The standard of proof at this stage is probable cause (or the French equivalent), rather than overwhelming evidence, so a heuristic approach is good enough. Wholesale traffic interception isn't needed: it's sufficient to monitor known or suspected nodes.
Now the government raids the owners of all the French nodes, confiscates their hard drives and decrypts their Freenet caches. There's bound to be some nasty stuff cached there on behalf of other nodes, even if the owners never uploaded or downloaded anything bad. The government charges the owners with "running a Freenet node" (so it's not necessary to prove what they uploaded or downlaoded) and makes a highly public announcement that it busted an extensive child porn / terrorist / neo-Nazi network thanks to the new anti-Freenet law. Then it waits for the handful of node operators it didn't catch to shut down their nodes and never say the word "Freenet" again.
Part of the problem here is that Freenet's design requires all nodes to belong to a single network, so if you have a heuristic for identifying Freenet traffic you can start from any node and 'unravel' the whole network. But to be fair to the Freenet designers, the alternative - lots of small, isolated darknets - isn't very appealing to users, because the only people you end up communicating with belong to the small intersection of "people I trust" and "privacy nuts". I'm a privacy nut who trusts his friends, and even for me that intersection isn't large enough to make for much of a conversation.