JOURNAL: Global Guerrilla Software

The global guerrilla underground is hard at work creating new tools. Here is a great one in process called I2P. It is being built by a ad hoc team of developers. I2P is software that creates an encrypted -- with an objective of military grade encryption like Skype -- P2P tunnel for anonymous:

• File transfer: file sharing.
  
• Browsing: you can browse any site through a proxy server. The proxy server and the site you are browsing doesn't know who you are.
  
• Site hosting: you can host an I2P site for anonymous I2P users. It can't be seen others or taken down using a denial of service attack.
  
• Chat: text chat like AIM or MSN.
  
• VoIP: voice communications.

I2P is basically a multi-purpose communications layer upon which applications ( for chat, VoIP, etc.) can be built. A network using this software would be extremely difficult to take down. Looks very interesting, will keep a close eye on this.

Comments

[protokol]

I hang out in the chan alot. IRC over to irc.freenode.net, channel #i2p

or even better, fire up i2p and use it's IRC server. it mirrors to freenode! make sure to mention that protocol sent you, and tell them how much capitalism sucks. they'll debate for hours!

[An Onymous]

"Global guerrilla underground"?

Depending on your definition, I suppose you can include me, but I've been working for the last decade to provide private communication between like minded people because I think that without such a link, life isn't worth living. Tech is what I do, and I'm going to use it for what I want. I want to talk to people close to me and know it is a private chat.

"Could be used by terrorists" is a slogan for control freaks. I am not accusing you of being one; you're carefully neutral on that.

I do think a great way to make more terrorists is to push monitoring far enough down that nothing is private, so that the preservation of status quo becomes Every Citizen Unit's Duty. Then, disagreement is nearly by definition terrorism, and otherwise reasonable people end up on the wrong side.

What do you have to hide?

[Ken Hagler]

This reminds me of Freedom.net, an anonymizing network that tried and failed to make it as a commercial product a few years ago.

[jrandom]

Thanks for the link John, this blog has provided some new insight into various activities that I hadn't seen elsewhere, and is done in a calm manner, avoiding the "ooga booga" scare tactics typically used.

Ken - yes, I2P has largely the same functionality as ZKS/Freedom, though with a more complete threat model and fully distributed systems. All aspects of the I2P is also both free and open source (with most of the code outright public domain) - a necessity for threat models that include state-sized adversaries.

We're still in the "quiet phase" though, working through bugfixes and improving the reliability of the system, so I don't want to get anyone's hopes up until the 1.0 release in July

[Ken Hagler]

I'm glad it's open source--I think this is necessary, not only in dealing with the NSA, but also in keeping it going. Although Freedom.net failed as a commercial product, the anonymous remailer network has survived for around ten years as an open-source project.