[Freedombox-discuss] Rouge Freedomboxes and government intervention

[William Gardella]

Just as an aside, I think it's worth noting (as bert just pointed out)
that there are serious and perhaps intractable limits to the degree of
protection an OS distro like Freedombox can provide if it simply causes
the police to resort to, well, traditional police tactics in removing
and investigating the system.  The only defense Freedombox has against
that is its deployment model, which would force police to enter a large
number of private homes, activist meeting-places, etc., to confiscate
what they currently confiscate by just raiding a few hosting providers.
And again, the more nodes, the stronger this effect.  Sheer numbers can
help compensate for the physical access vulnerability, especially when
the issue is something like government efforts to "remove" WikiLeaks
from the Internet.  But no user of any computer system should expect
complete anonymity--Freedombox can at best help get the risks of
searches and seizures disrupting online activism to be proportional to
the risks of "traditional" activist distribution methods being disrupted
in the same way.

And, of course, raiding party offices and such is nothing new, and can
at least be resisted with physical and generally speaking nonviolent
means such as building occupations.