Martin Varsafsky reports from China that he is able to access the Internet anonymously and did not find any effective censorship on his Internet use.
That means the vision of the enemies of freedom running the show now in European Internet policy, the vision of watching all European citizens round the clock, is actually stronger surveillance than the Chinese practice now.
Ten years ago, European policy papers stated something like this:
"Such a restrictive regime is inconceivable for Europe as it would severely interfere with the freedom of the individual and its political traditions"
(Illegal and Harmful Content on the Internet, Communication from the Commission, 1996, pages 14-15).
This statement was in contrast to a restrictive censorship regime "some third countries" had enacted at the time.
The "freedom of the individual" and Europe's political traditions are in severe danger from the Surveillance Directive. Allowing it to stand would mean surpassing China.
Now that FON has accepted a large pile of money from Google and wants to seriously expand their membership, the current privacy policy should start addressing the questions I asked a couple of months ago. To repeat some of those:
Can I join under a random name and address as long as no money is involved?
Who exactly gets to see the FON databases? Under what circumstances will FON give access to third parties, and what third parties? The CIA? Spanish police or judicial authorities? Private companies interested in the database?
Who is logging Internet access? Individual Foneros at their access point or the mothership in Spain? Is FON complying with the still existing requirement in the telecommunications privacy directive to erase or anonymize all traffic data upon end of connection (the Surveillance Directive is not yet law)? If the Surveillance Directive is implemented in Spain, who keeps the traffic data, and how?
Glenn Fleishman notes that there is nothing new from a technical point of view in FONs concept:
Lest Fon be seen as entirely new and unique exclusive of the three firms mentioned before that tried this model using cheap computers and software instead of commodity gateways and firmware—Joltage, SOHONetworks, and Sputnik—remember that LessNetworks and Radiuz have been offering community authentication for a while.
I agree. Sharing Wifi hotspot access seems to be a rather obvious idea. So the success or failure of FON will depend largely on its marketing, and the public perception of the FON brand.
FON has a great chance to convince European users that their particular implementation of this idea should be accepted, if they take a clear position against Internet surveillance. Branding FON as the technological answer to the Surveillance Directive would give a strong boost to the campaign.
If on the other hand Mr. Varsafsky wants to build surveillance chips into the "condoms" he is talking about on his blog, he will not only fail to take advantage of the situation, but on top of that meet with strong resistance from everybody active in the fight to preserve the human right to private telecommunications.
The English version of FON's terms of use is not yet quite perfect.
It contains some simple spelling errors like "acces" and "intelectual property". Whoever wrote that text did not bother to run a spelling checker on it.
It also does not answer the one vital question that decides if FON is extremely useful to get around Internet surveillance, and therefore worthy of attention from the many citizens who don't approve of having their every move logged.
That one vital question is: Can I join under a random name and address?
Technically, that seems to be no problem. The form for signing up requires that people give a name and an address. However, joining as a "Linus" user does not require any payment flowing in either direction, so there does not seem to be any verification procedure built in.
That means the question is if the terms of service prohibit anonymous use.
However, as far as I can see, there is no answer to this question yet.
There should be one. FON should actively welcome anonymous registrations, and make a special point of the fact that an anonymous worldwide Wifi cloud immediately ends the surveillance dreams of Mr. Clarke and the other European enemies of freedom.
The "Privacy Policy" is also still inadequate to the task. We are talking about thousands and potentially millions of users who give their addresses to be published in "FON Maps". Who exactly gets to see the FON databases? Under what circumstances will FON give access to third parties, and what third parties? The CIA? Spanish police or judicial authorities? Private companies interested in the database?
The importance of a data protection policy rises in proportion with the amount of data concerned. With rising numbers of users this policy deserves further improvement.
In the shadow blog I hide from comment and trackback spammers at k.lenz.name/discuss I got an interesting comment to my last post on FON coming to the rescue against the evil forces trying to set up a giant snooping operation.
That comment remarked that some politicians in Denmark are proposing to make it illegal to operate a Wifi allowing unauthenticated access.
I answered that this is only a proposal, and that in Germany current law says exactly the opposite.
Under German law, providers of Internet access have an obligation to enable anonymous access and payment, if that is technologically possible and can be reasonably expected, see Article 4, Paragraph 6 of the German Law on Data Protection in Teleservices (Teledienstdatenschutzgesetz), which covers providing Internet access, see Article 1 of the law and Article 2, Paragraph 2 Number 3 of the Law on Teleservices (Teledienstgesetz).
I also said that it would be unpracticable to operate a FON hotspot if you were obliged to verify the identity of users.
That might be wrong, since one can use the payment process (for example credit card payment) to get an identity for the users.
But if this kind of legislation is enacted, providing anonymous FON access would become illegal. That would kill the idea of using this network as a countermeasure against Internet surveillance, at least as a legal countermeasure. Black networks using some FON CLONE software, as described in "Unwirer" by Doctorow and Stross two years ago, would still be a possibility.
As long as providing anonymous Internet access over a Wifi connection is legal, or even (as under German law) an obligation for the provider, the idea is alive and kicking.
A couple of hours after I called for massive deployment of Wifi hotspots enabling anonymous access in Europe as the simplest method to counter the harmful proposals to watch all European citizens around the clock, I saw a post at Joi Ito's blog introducing me to the new FON network idea.
Actually they propose to do exactly that. They want to build a large network of Wifi access points.
I don't know yet if anonymous access will be possible. However, I think that this idea might help European citizens fight back effectively against the outrageous human rights violations planned in Brussels. Here is a comment I wrote to Joi Ito's post at his blog:
This might turn out very useful to circumvent the harmful proposals in the EU parliament to store all traffic data. I have blogged those today, since it seems that some kind of legislation will actually be passed in the near future.If we get a couple of hundred thousand Wifi hotspots across Europe run by people who don't know who uses them, it will be difficult to enforce traffic data storage against those mini-providers, and even if there is a logfile left, the Wifi provider would not know the name of the user in question.
I note that over 50.000 people signed the petition against the traffic data retention proposals, so it might be possible to get that kind of coverage rather fast, at least faster than the legislators come through with their obnoxious plans.
That in turn would depend on whether people billing for access (the "Bills" in the FON system) could accept payment anonymously, for example over e-gold or a similar sensible payment mechanism.
And it would also depend on whether people who log in as a "Linus" would tell the Wifi provider in question their name, or if the list of names and associated passwords is kept out of reach of individual providers, and maybe in a country respecting the human right to confidential communication (e.g. Japan), out of easy reach for the people who try building an European Internet surveillance infrastructure.
I don't know if those conditions are true. But if they are, this FON idea might have turned up exactly in time to help moot the plans to watch all European citizens all the time.