CrimeProblems
This article, although written in the first-person form, reflects the controversial opinions of various users; the article does not claim to be complete or accurate, it does not replace legal advice. Help to improve it by putting the article in a neutral form and replacing opinions with facts.
The developer's agenda is to create a censorship resistant network whose goal is to succeed in arbitrarily hostile environments. The interpretations of a censorship resistant network can vary considerably. For example, the question of whether a democracy can be an arbitrarily hostile environment is apparently not as easy to answer as is generally believed. The use of anonymizing software usually does not make the user an outlaw, but it does not exempt him from the laws of his country to which he is subject. The use is always at the user's own risk, and every participant should be aware of this.
In the past, a minority of the participants argued that the software should only be distributed to people at least 18 years of age, in other words, to people who are aware of the implications of their actions and can accept the possible consequences and are fit enough to represent their interests in a borderless network without outside help.
The absence of fear of punishment means that such networks are also used to circumvent democratically agreed social guidelines and behaviour and, in addition, to exploit them deliberately at the expense and to the detriment of other participants. At present, visible crime is comparatively low, and crime does not mean transfers under private law, as in the case of copyright infringements. Should this change one day and the P2P network become conspicuous as a result, it can be assumed that even in democracies this type of software, in which all the IP addresses of its subscribers are stored in a database, will not last in the long term.
The total absence of a superior regulatory authority does not make it easy for the participant. He can no longer rely on the help of a dedicated intervention force; on the contrary, by making his resources available to third parties, he may be held responsible. The simple participant becomes, so to speak, an independent businessman, everything that is brought to him he can either affirm or deny, only ignore and sit out is no longer entitled to him, because that would mean a tacit acceptance of the offer.
No one has claimed that the road to a freer society, whatever the individual understands by it, will be easy. In the past, however, it has been repeatedly proven that change can be brought about by participants. Even the developers, who are reluctant to deal with the social results of their development, have been sensitized to specific social problems. Whether this will also succeed in the future, if the network will lose its manageable size, depends on the constant willingness of its participants to intervene in a regulating manner within the bounds of their possibilities.
Open discussion on handling unwanted content
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I found some illegal porn, and it upsets me. How should we handle this? (I have of course notified relevant authorities)
It's kinda easy to say "We can't do anything, just let it be", but... well.. you know what I mean
Notifying the authorities? What on earth can they do about it? The best thing you can do is '''ignore''' the content. I2P is designed to make locating content providers extremely difficult, is it not? The fact that such content is available is just a testament to its own success, as distasteful as it is. Like a canary in a coal mine. Also Tor and Freenet are possible havens of illegal activity, but have many legit uses.
If you look at this issue from the standpoint of law enforcement, notifying the authorities even about such content being hosted on an anonymous network can be extremely helpful. I'm not just talking about metadata, I'm talking about victim identification. As far as darknets go, I2P is remarkably clean, comparable to the clearnet (a testament to the fact that I2P is doing something right). Irongeek's YouTube introduction to I2P and Tor features a conversation he has with law enforcement during his presentation specifically on this issue. Basically it's like walking down the street and finding a brick of cocaine. Yes, you didn't commit a crime by finding it, but you should REALLY notify the relevant authorities, even if anonymously. And if someone walks by and sees you holding a brick of cocaine, that in and of itself looks pretty suspicious. People who abuse I2P, even if they are few and far between, hurt the community and give it a bad reputation. Don't do it.
You cannot provide Free Speech "only for some speech". It's pointless to even try. Every network-innate censorship can and will be routed around.
Besides, to truly support free speech/communication means also supporting free communication that you strongly disagree with.
I agree with the above comment. The best thing is to hope that the authorities can use forensic techniques to identify who created the photograph. When running a Tor or I2P node I understand that it will be used for speech that I disagree with. That is the nature of the world. There are some very evil people in the world who abuse children (not only sexually) and the image you saw was only *evidence* of what a cruel world we live in. You should be especially cautious about the authorities with these matters as they have been an enormous number of innocent people prosecuted for incidents regarding child pornography (such as Operation Ore in the UK). If you are concerned about this you should run with images off (as I do when browsing Tor hidden services).
"Your freedom ends, where mine begins". I fear this problem will grow on and more people will misue i2ps freedom to break ethic laws. But I don't have any idea how to handle this problem!
The "crime problems" are nothing but a trade-off for our freedoms There is (and will always be) some illegal material on I2P. It is a trade-off, however, for our freedoms. There are many trade-offs like this: allowing warrantless home searches, for example, would indeed reduce crime. (Many criminals escape prosecution because police cannot just raid their houses when they'd need it; they must wait for a search warrant to be signed, and precious time is lost). Most citizens, however, understand this as a trade-off and prefer to keep it "as is". Even if this allows some drug dealer or a burglar to stay free for a while.
Many people think that drug dealing shouldn't be illegal in the first place! Second that. It's good free speech can actually exist in the real world. And, at the same time, unsuprising that the very people helping to make it a reality discover that they do not very much like what it is used for.
I can't believe this debate is even happening on a eepsite. I don't agree with kiddie pornographers but I'm glad to see their kind on here. Their behavior will improve i2p trial by fire style. What better metric to reasure ourselves with than the beligerent unabashed behavior of societies-most-hated?
I don't think that the presence of sick material is a proof for trial by fire - normal p2p-networks (without anonymity) are also full of it... If you want to have a proof you have to hack the computer of a neighbor (or other known person used as victim), install the i2p filesharing clients without his knowledge, collect all the kiddie-porn you could find with his computer and distribute all of it with the clients again. When this person isn't arrested in the next years, I would speak of a solved trial by fire style... THIS is SICK, but a good test... <sup>_</sup> If you like, you could hack another random computer first and exploit your neighbor from there with well known kiddie-tools. So it could be he has a small chance to gainsay everything to the judge.
ICK, but a good test...
I fear this problem will grow on and more people will misue i2ps freedom to break ethic laws. But I don't have any idea how to handle this problem!
What is crime?
As wikipedia already states, there is no such general definition of "crime"[1].
It is a consense of a bunch of people that decided to prohibit something. There might be political, economical or ethical reasons for those people agreeing on it. Though, all of the reasons that makes something being illegal and a crime are subject of change throughout time. Which means, that something that's legal today, might be illegal tomorrow or vice versa.
For many people, the ethical part bears the greatest obstacle. Though, ethic is conditioned and educated. Read about it in "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker (ISBN-10: 0670022950 / ISBN-13: 978-0670022953).
A few centuries ago, the crowd was watching caged animals (cats) burn to death for amusement. They watched humans fighting each other until death. Torturing humans was common sense to rescue their souls ...
Nowadays, this type of violence feels wrong to most people. But it is important to understand, that these feelings and interpretations are not universal laws, but subject of change over time.
No matter what your definition of crime is and what your consequence will be, if you judge someone's action to be wrong, illegal, awful, ... my understanding of I2P is, that I may prosper and pursue my own understanding of freedom, connect and exchange with others that agree with me, and ultimately I don't need to fear you for disagreeing with me.
I actually would look at this from a different perspective. Without anonymous services like I2P, child pornography and such would likely just be traded among people who know each other in the form of sneakernet drives. Not only is this much harder for law enforcement to monitor, it opens the possibility that organized crime could profit from its sale, which would almost certainly fuel further exploitation of children for profit. I2P undermines the power of criminal syndicates in this arena.
Second, anonymity is never perfect. It's something of a truism in law enforcement that all habitual criminals eventually make mistakes. Silk Road was taken down because its misconfigured server gave away identifying information. The privacy I2P provides, however great, is still limited, especially in the face of law enforcement agencies with subpoena powers working in cooperation across international borders. By providing the veneer of safety to pedophiles, it actually brings them into the open where they are more likely to make mistakes, and where those mistakes can be more easily exploited by LE.
Regarding the above definition of crime; I take the moral universalist position that humans share certain innate moral principles. So I think that there are those acts which inevitably make those who perpetrate them hostis humani generis: enemies of all mankind. Not all things that have been declared crimes are among these acts; indeed most aren't. But study every legal system ever put together and you'll see prohibitions on murder, bodily injury, kidnapping, rape, theft, fraud, and so on and so forth. That is truly the bedrock of civilized society.