The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else?
If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data?
The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.
In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges.
So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.
These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago.
The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a random car and plant drugs on it.
The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.
> These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago.
Here's a recent one:[0]
> Gibson’s arrest grew out of an ongoing probe of the “Freenet” — an online network that allows users to anonymously share images, chat on message boards and access sites, the probable cause statement says.
> Me, I'll run my Freenet nodes in anonymously leased VPS, and access them via Tor.
Some would say that's the way to do everything. But it doesn't exactly make it easy for the average Joe.
And that's kind of the point too. Police behave badly more often when there is a network with 500 people on it because they don't really understand it and nobody is paying attention to anything. But when there are only 500 people on it, the 500 people can all be using five proxies and blockchains and credit default swaps and whatever else.
Meanwhile by the time it's popular enough that Joe wants to use it, it's also popular enough that Inspector Clouseau is no longer on the case by and large.
Hey, I respect Freenet hugely. It's almost 20 years old, and it's been ~well maintained throughout. People do hate on Java, but I've had no problems with it, using OpenJDK in Debian.
But I don't buy the argument that it's targeted just because it's too small. No matter how many used Freenet, it would get targeted because it's way too laid back about child porn. Sure there's child porn on Tor onion sites, but it's not so easy to find, since the Hidden Wiki has been cleaned up. On Freenet, however, it's a top level category on one of the featured search sites.
If the same percentage of people used Freenet as use email then it couldn't be "targeted" because targeting implies some kind of special notice, but there's nothing special about using email. Which is true even if email providers exist who are "way too laid back about child porn" etc.
If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data?
The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.