What you've said doesn't add anything to the conversation. It's roughly equivalent to standing up in the middle of a lecture, yelling "You suck!" and then walking out without any explanation of your own ideas.
Why is his idea flawed? What would it require to succeed? Are there other similar ideas that you think are good? Answering these questions would be interesting. Doing what you did is not.
It's a fantastic idea. What is missing from it is how the infrastructure is and probably always will be under the domain (pun intended) of corporations.
For example, how do we provide "internet access" with these servers? We don't own the fiber; it it gets shut down we're dead in the water. ISPs run the networks and therefore control the content and charge for it as much as they want.
An alternative is state-controlled ISPs--but we all can guess how fun that would be.
I'm trying to think of yet other alternatives, but I'm drawing a blank.
I'm not entirely sure it's possible. We've seen examples of other governments taking down sites because of the way internet protocols work, specifically BGP [1]. I believe some number of the DNS root servers are directly or nearly-directly controlled by the government. Service providers have legal obligations to allow access into their facilities. We're not as bad off as others - some governments do run the ISPs.
I don't see the difference between having encrypted data on a mini-server at your house vs. housed at a provider. If the data was stored centrally and there were few options, it would make the legal process of getting the data easier. With the existing options for hosting data in many different countries, this doesn't seem to be a problem. Even then, you could probably stripe this data across centrally stored hosting solutions and still have a more efficient and secure process than hosting off of a 'Freedom Box'.
Options seem to be:
1. Distributed storage. The storage is striped across these boxes all over, and no single box has any data. Nobody can subpoena the data because of the process involved in getting the information from so many people at once. I think using distributed storage would be very, very difficult with data redundancy, latency, and maintaining security with such high availability and access.
2. Each box is self operating, but managed centrally. Data storage is contained to a single (or few) boxes to simplify data access and speed. This still allows centralized access to the data, and fewer people would be involved in collecting the data. Higher levels of security could be maintained, but legally easier to access.
3. Self managed secure boxes that have a 'cloud' or 'bot' organization of peer-to-peer relationships. Again, these types of systems work today, but there are still centralized servers and most of the workload is still carried by large servers/organizations.
It seems easier to simply make Tor more secure, which is a different debate if that's even possible. The article reads like a lawyer who has some tech experience thinks he has created a magic Internet v2.0 because he's found a way to get around the legal ramifications of privacy without regard to technical ramifications.
Why is his idea flawed? What would it require to succeed? Are there other similar ideas that you think are good? Answering these questions would be interesting. Doing what you did is not.