Your infrastructure will immediately be used to download or upload child pornography. If you're exceptionally unlucky, the FBI will come knocking and, if you're unable to provide them with a useful honeypot, you may risk legal consequences. If you're unable to prove your innocence (the request for the CP did come from your IP address, after all) then you may be very screwed.
I invite the community to toss around ideas about how to protect against this. I hypothesize that it's an unsolvable problem: if you enable strong anonymity, that anonymity will immediately be used for child porn.
One way to combat this would be to have some kind of credentialing, where you are able to generate credentials for the anonymous party to use. Assuming your infrastructure is set up as a Tor hidden service, then it's possible for them to use your infrastructure anonymously, and then you can revoke the credentials for individual violators.
However, under that scheme, your IP address(es) are shared by every user. 4chan will immediately ban all of them as soon as it becomes clear you're a proxy, for example.
It may still be worth exploring, but it needs some thought. Tor itself still doesn't have "endpoint bridges," that is, endpoints which aren't publicly listed. Meaning it's very easy to ban all of Tor, as far as I know.
I'm not sure if you would count this as a solution, but, conceivably you could "enable anonymity" at very low bandwidth ... say ... the equivalent of 9600 baud ?
This is fast enough for speech. It is not fast enough for any kind of multimedia that would be acceptable in 2014 and beyond. It might be a barrier that would cause all bad guys to use other networks, but still allow the kind of "freedom" that we're all convinced twitter gives us (and so on).
What a fantastic idea. This seems worth pursuing. It should be possible to configure a modern browser to work with low bandwidth: HTML/CSS/JS would load, but images and other media wouldn't. Is there any reason why HN, Reddit, Twitter, webmail, and other services like IRC wouldn't be usable under those conditions?
It seems like people might be much more willing to rent out their infrastructure to anonymous parties strictly for those purposes.
Also, you don't really need to configure a browser - just use lynx, which will ignore most of the bandwidth hungry aspects of a site.
The text on the current top story (the Wright Brothers article) is about 11kbytes. That doesn't include any html or css or anything else. That would make a page load at over ten seconds just for the text.
The point isn't that it can not be done, but that people would not tolerate it unless they had a real need.
Here's the issue. Return presumption of innocence back and problem's solved.
Obviously, that's impossible in a real world.
> credentials for the anonymous party to use
That wouldn't be anonymous anymore. And there's no way to realistically force a single human to have only one credential - if one's banned they'll just generate a new one.
If an authority were to come to you and demand you cooperate in determining my identity, then there would be no way for you to oblige, except by providing them with a log of the VPN activity, or allowing them to set up a pen trap to log the VPN activity. At that point, the privacy is still as strong as the Tor network, so both Tor and this extra layer would have to fall in order to be unmasked.
(In practice, it's more complicated than that: your infrastructure would be a fixed endpoint, meaning that if it's compromised then an adversary would gain a log of your activity. That would provide an overall picture of what you're up to on the internet. Tor rotates endpoints, making it hard to piece together that info. So in practice a user should want your service to be something like a middleman between two different anonymity services. But that's outside the scope of this comment for now.)
This becomes a pretty attractive idea, because it's not necessarily a great idea to assume that Tor should be the world's one realistic defense. Since Snowden used Tor, you can be absolutely certain that various powers are going to take a keen interest in penetrating Tor. They may use dirty tricks to do it, such as joining the Tor project as an apparently-trustworthy developer.
Extra layers of defense such as the one outlined above may be worth pursuing.
Am I the only one to whom this sounds absolutely crazy? How can I trust you if I don't know who you are? (I mean the general you, not you personally, devconsole.)
Your comments could have been deliberately sanitized -- perhaps you have trolling accounts elsewhere that you are exceptionally good at keeping separate from this one, and spend time making this one look good. One could be posing as a mild-mannered Python developer here on HN, but be spending one's evenings being Super-Mallory the Malicious, trolling and trading illegal information.
I really want to be able to support things like mesh networks and Tor, but the very risk the GP noted (people will use your resources for Bad Things, and good luck defending from the feds) prevents me from being willing to do so. There's no way I would trust you or someone else that I don't personally know enough to use my resources, unless I were somehow able to keep meticulous logs which exonerate me from any activity they do. (And, I don't trust that such logs would even do that...)
Saying that you should be able to trust a stranger is like saying that you should be able to run a courier service for strangers where you have no idea whether they are transporting drugs or counterfeit money.
Well, cryptographers had invented a fancy thing called "ring signatures" that allows one to check whenever a signature belongs to someone in a group, but don't allow to determine who exactly that was. So, technically, it's well possible to remail anonymous (as far as belonging to a group does not break your anonymity) and be trusted at the same time.
But, unfortunately, I don't think F2F mesh networks would prosper anytime soon.
What is a piece of legislation says and what is actually "law" is often not the same, as the courts can interpret it however they want.
But yes, we should think of the children, 9/11, etc.
My concerns are:
As for anonymity: Internet protocols require addressing - without an address where to send packets back you can only communicate unidirectionally - sending information but not receiving any. Does being identified by an address still considered "anonymous"?
As for prevention: I'm not sure why need any sort of law to do so. Is there any case - except for law enforcement situations - where one's prevented from disclosing their private information?
Also, writing "requires you pay for it" may have bad consequences. For example, in Russia we had a copyright law that said quite similar thing - a statement that any software license must explicitly define payment process (or explicitly declare rights being provided free of charge) - and this led to issue with perceived legality of some FLOSS licenses that don't say anything about. To my knowledge, this hadn't been ever examined in a court and had been fixed in laws since then, but hope you see the point.
1. I have a right to read or write public information in an anonymous way.
2. I have a right to prevent you from reading or writing MY private information in an anonymous way, even if the intent is to obtain the right to exercise #1 in the process.
3. Using someone else's infrastructure/compute/power to enable #1 without breaking #2 requires you pay for it. I would also propose my private information is available at a price.
Expecting the right to anonymity by removing the rights of others in the process places an individual in cognitive dissonance. It's not a good place to be.
With the advent of cryptocurrencies, we're finally in a place someone can pay me to use a portion of my infrastructure for enabling their anonymity. I'm willing to contribute to the cause as long as it's worth my while.