[Kiberpipa] [Fwd: [Autistici/Inventati] Piano R*: L'altra faccia delle spirale!]

[Andraz Tori]

-------- Posredovano sporočilo ---------
Od: Autistici/Inventati <info at autistici.org>

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Il Piano R*
http://www.onenetbeyond.org
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ENGLISH VERSION
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+++ R* Plan

New forms of expression and organization are arising, disorderly, creating 
relationships, ways of production and means of imagination. Day after day, 
without any prearranged plan, but with many shared ideas, we see new ways of 
living in this chameleon-like world -- ways of living that corporations and 
billionaire foundations try to exploit to their and their shareholders' 
advantage.

Awkward attempts to fill the "dangerous regulative gap" with laws inspired by 
the clash of civilization, by international terrorism, by the need to know 
everything about everyone, by humidity and by locusts, have created a context 
in which rules and their enforcement are but "another point of view", adequate
for any situation, for any party in the game and for the most popular tabloids.

Incapable of telling good from wrong, institutions are trying to close the 
fence, proceeding in a confused, contradictory and hasty way. They are working
hard to give rise to a closed-minded, terroristic mentality, and to construct 
the dangers needed to prevent an "improper" use of the Web, in an attempt to 
create the Global Mall, a secure and well-lit place.

We go along a path of repression, a not so slow repression against anybody 
challenging this not so new mentality, and its cunning sponsorship.

All this, and much more, has led in the last few years to a more or less 
evident violation of what is usually called civil rights and freedom of speech:
the regular tapping of any communication channel, an increased trend towards 
websites and mailboxes seizures, more or less successful attempts to censor 
difficult and independent information, and the criminalization of exchange and
sharing.

>From its commercial, wonderland-like image, Internet turns, according to the 
current needs, into a hell of pedophiles, cheaters and terrorists.

Unwillingly thrown into this scenery, and basing on our experience, we have 
tried to make out a different way to arrange our services, to re-assert our 
will to R*esist.

What follows is a not too long description of our plan.


+++ ONE NET BEYOND

A network of resistant communication

In this grim scenery, the undeniable danger of concentrating so many sensitive 
resources in one spot has led us to consider an alternative structure for the 
A/I services, a structure that could better resist the growing repressive trend
(a trend which we have experienced directly, last but not least in the 
Trenitalia case [1] and with the copy of our server carried out by the police 
with the co-operation of Aruba[2]), as well as the apparent lack of respect for
fundamental rights and, more generally, the aggression of a society wishing to
control and repress any unmarketable instinct.

Our aim is to create communication structures that cannot be annihilated but 
through a rather great effort by those who can't bear our existence.

Believing that building an impregnable, isolated fortress does not make any 
sense, we have opted for a solution that spreads the load of services and users
(and therefore their sensitive data) among several servers, which, if needed, 
can be easily and quickly replaced; we have thus favoured a decentralized 
structure, with many interchangeable nodes, to a centralized one, which may be 
easier to bring about, but is certainly less efficient.

+++ THE R* PLAN

The R* Plan consists in the distribution of several servers, and thus of 
services, among various providers scattered around the world (we are constantly
looking for providers or ISPs willing to host our computers).

Every server hosts all fundamental services offered by A/I and some particular 
services, as well a copy of the information needed to re-create from scratch 
the whole structure (the most important part being the configurations and users
database).

Public data (especially websites) are contained in all servers, so that it is 
very difficult to prevent the users from accessing some particular content.

Private data (especially mailboxes) are scattered among different servers, in 
order to limit any damages. We considered it more important to grant privacy 
and the possibility of communicating than to try and make endless copies of 
private mails to be placed in all our computers.

If a server is compromised, all users will be moved to another server, without
having to reconfigure anything: thus we will try to grant continuity in 
communication.

If all public servers are violated at the same time, this will mean that the 
situation is much more worrying. In that case, the impossibility to send 
e-mails will only be a tiny inconvenient in a much more complex scenery. If 
this happens, you can contact us at our Alpha Centauri address, where we hope 
that by that time the much talked about better world will be ready for use.

Furthermore, all data that can be used to decode messages (especially 
encryption keys) will be always encrypted, and, as usual, we will keep no logs
(i.e. the data needed to identify connections to and from our net) and no private
data concerning our users.

The solutions we have sorted out aim at forcing, or at least at spurring, 
anybody wishing to access our servers to contact A/I, so that we can know what 
they are planning to do, as well as how and for what reasons, thus ensuring the
continuity of all communications.

Such things should be actually given for granted, but in our strange society, 
founded on fear towards our neighbours, they seem to become something new, 
which must be invented and created from scratch.

Briefly, the R* Plan aims at:

+ Preventing any forceable communication blockage.
+ Being able to decide about the modalities of any external intervention on our
  network (and therefore on the users' data).
+ Offering our services to more and more people who are not willing to hand in 
  their private communication to corporative sociologists (in the best case), 
  by overcoming the physical limits of one only server.
+ Doing anything possible, using imagination when needed, to grant privacy to 
  our users.

+++ THE TURNING POINT

We find it obvious that this is not enough. It undoubtedly creates better 
circumstances than those we have been enduring up to now, but the fight to 
oppose the equation "control+repression=solution to all problems" is much more 
complex than a simple technical solution.

In these dreadful years, the almost fetish aggression to many people's 
fundamental liberties will maybe spread a culture focused on the defence of 
privacy and freedom of speech. Or maybe not. In that case, all technical tricks
we can make out will probably be useless.

Our hope is that more and more people do their part to learn and teach others 
about the use of digital and other instruments to stop the threat to free 
communication and speech.

We have worked to improve our services, to make them more resistant, and we 
will keep doing so. But this should and must not be sufficient. What we do not 
want is to create a false sense of safety, so that our users think they can 
totally rely on us for their privacy. The world around us has already proved 
that any plan has a backdoor, and there are no unfailing tricks or plans that 
can free us from a steady personal involvement in our private defence.

+++ NOTE

1 See the Trenitalia vs. zenmai23-A/I case: 
	http://www.autistici.org/ai/trenitalia/index.en.php
2 See the A/I Crackdown case: 
	http://www.autistici.org/ai/crackdown/comunicato_en_210605.html

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Autistici Inventati Collective
October 2005
http://www.inventati.org - http://www.autistici.org
info at autistici.org
Key fingerprint = C7AE F979 F2EB F748 9703  BD90 8A3A C990 F4B8 FC81
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il Piano R* - http://www.onenetbeyond.org