FreedomBox: wall-wart firmware to provide privacy and route around censorship

The FreedomBox Foundation is a newly formed charity that has set out to make wall-wart sized, self-contained Linux routers that will provide important anonymizing and networking services, even when the government (or some other entity) terminates or surveils your network access. The project is led by Eben Moglen, formerly of the Free Software Foundation, now with the Software Freedom Law Center.

Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree "platform" technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times.

Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. "Plug servers" and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as "media centers," "communications centers," "wireless routers," and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home.

Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom.

The FreedomBox Foundation

• [wygit]

  It’s sad that when I first read this and thought “How cool!”, I wasn’t even thing of foreign regimes, but our own.
  Reading the stuff the Administration is (probably) going to get thru Congress is just scary.

• [Beelzebuddy]

  I’m having a bit of a hard time figuring out exactly what these are supposed to do. Are they meant to be their own independent mesh network? Are they a tor-like interface to the real web, talking to “known” but friendly wifi routers and just providing plausible deniability? The first case seems practically impossible to deploy effectively, while the second seems ineffectual.

  A hardware-based scheme like this would require all the cooperation of people setting up a new internet in onion- or eep-space, while also requiring them to buy their own infrastructure and hoping the tragedy of the commons doesn’t set in.

• [FutureNerd]

  This post has a high propaganda-to-details ratio.

• [turn_self_off]

  gets me thinking about some kind of tor node with a freenet-like proxy system.

  look up a page online that is no longer there, but that someone once visited and it is likely to still float around in the proxy cloud somewhere that the system can the grab for you transparently.

• [Cowicide]

  Ugh, thought that said Wal-Mart… had cognitive dissonance for few seconds… everything back to normal now…. feeling less disoriented… back to grind…

• [Voris Klopchick]

  Don’t forget routing traffic through the power grid connection that’s already there!

• [rebdav]

  Cory,
  A home appliance is great for those who don’t know how to config their systems. But the real need is on the streets and the only way to make it really work is with dedicated hardware.
  You are probably one of the best to push for the development of a Openmoko like FreedomPhone project.
  Something that can do GSM, WiFi mesh, and maybe even have a FRS/PMR446 radio fallback mode. A PGP crypto mode for voice and data would tickle many a gadget and spy geeks inner James Bond.
  Sell the phone with a crank or yo-yo generator to keep it charged during a multi day police siege.
  I think there would be enough people who would buy the phone just to bring down the price for activists worldwide or for the cool factor.

  • [floraldeoderant]

    Oh hells yeah. I would buy that in a heartbeat, or other cliche for rapidity, for reasons: all of the above.

• [alllie]

  I wonder how much this will cost and how techie you’ll have to be to use it. And will it allow wifi communication from wifi to wifi, avoiding government controlled internet if needed.

  • [MattBD]

    Existing “plug servers”, as he calls them, are pretty easy to use actually. I’ve got a PogoPlug, which is one of those devices, and it essentially works as a self-hosted version of Dropbox. It’s very easy to set up – all you do is plug it in, connect it to your router, go to the Pogoplug website, register your device, and attach a flash drive or external hard drive to it and you’re ready to go. It uses an ARM processor, so it’s cheap to run, and the price was not bad at all – normally they cost £70 in the UK, but I got mine for £50 in the sale. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s significantly cheaper in the US. So a device based on similar hardware with a similar embedded OS could quite easily be cheap and easy to use.

    Of course, one of the greatest things about the PogoPlug is how hackable it is – I’ve installed Debian Squeeze on mine and I’m using it as a mail server. Obviously, this is a lot harder!

  • [shadowfirebird]

    Last time I looked: unknown; unknown; no.

• [Anonymous]

  The first website to be self hosted on a PogoPlug no hosting server needed http://www.just25watts.tk