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a.jhonson@vmail.me | 8 Mar 2012 00:29

A thought/"feature request" regarding "The message from Tahrir Square"

Hello list,

hopefully my thoughts will not be considered too heretical.  Honestly, please don't hesitate to tell me
if this is the wrong project to ask for implementing this proposal. I know it is major feature request and
this project at the moment aims at sharing data over active connections and in semi-real-time.

Taking "The message from Tahrir Square" into account it shows that the wired means of communication are
shut down and the wireless wide-area alternatieves are either centralised and/or localiseable by
technical measures. To adress this issue a trade of the luxury of real-time for a diversity of
transport-channels should be possible.

Now my thought, rather a question, is:
Why not, as an alternative meta-method of transport, make a "dump" of all data destined to be sent to a
specific peer and transport it otherwise as a file ?

These ways could be:
Sneakernet
USB dead drops
Bluetooth
(re)writeable CD/DVDs
diverse steganographic hacks
you name it...

Now I know, this is an asynchronous method of communication and would not be usable for VPN and TOR-like
applications, but it would combine advantages of the afforementioned ways (no data retention, no means
of time-correlation analysis and personal control over the data if you meet the respective person) with
the "core values" of gnunet (end-to-end encyption, anonymous file sharing, mutual authentification
and most important of all plausible deniability).

So why not implementing an API for these asynchronous transport channels ?

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Christian Grothoff | 8 Mar 2012 10:20

Re: A thought/"feature request" regarding "The message from Tahrir Square"

Hi!

The problem with dumping all data destined to a specific peer is that 
you don't know which data (a) belongs together (ECRS) and (b) goes to 
the same target, because of receiver-anonymity.  Also, just tracking 
queries that came from a peer in the past and then answering via mail is 
likely not useful --- the peer likely doesn't care anymore (as he was 
just forwarding for someone else and has since then forgotten about the 
state).

Another key point is that getting information in a timely manner is 
likely also crucial --- we don't need censorship-resistant anonymous 
networks to distribute information to prosecute WW II criminals. On the 
other hand, preventing collateral murder that still happens today 
requires more timely information flow and protection for those leaking 
information.

Now, in terms of countries going off-line, the current technical 
solution we have in GNUnet is content migration and selective 
replication.  So if the country is off-line, peers of people who are 
likely to travel (i.e. journalists and others with a ticket to get out) 
can be configured to soak up data from other peers (migration) and users 
that have particularly interesting information can tell their peers to 
'push' that information more strongly into the network (by picking a 
higher replication level).

The result is similar to your proposal in that the peers that receive 
data essentially build up a dump (database) and then that dump can be 
moved.  Now, there is no 'intended target' for the dump, other than "the 
outside world".  But once that peer connects at the outside, the

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