Enabling freedom and openness with Mozilla?
by Al
Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.
Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.
To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.
What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.
One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.
Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.
Comments
A friend of mine replied on Facebook about adding support for Darknets:
“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.
Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”
I edited my original post to point here — I’d love to see tools built into Firefox along these lines.
Torbutton is a good start, though it would be especially awesome to be able to fire off a one-click Tor server using it.
The remailer network is still alive and well, but Mixmaster isn’t the easiest thing in the world to configure. The next-generation remailer, Mixminion, has a completed protocol, but I don’t know how close it is to being deployable; Nick Mathewson or Len Sassaman would be good people to talk to about that. I don’t have any idea how to incorporate this into Firefox, but a remailer network plugin for Thunderbird could be cool.
Moving a little farther out into the theoretical space, there’s an excellent design for an information-theoretically secure pseudonymous email system that Len and Nick published with Bram Cohen back in 2005, The Pynchon Gate. The paper has been turned into a protocol spec, and it’s ready to be implemented, but this hasn’t actually been done yet. If you know of anyone who would be interested, let’s talk. (I’d do it myself but I all kinds of do not have the time.) Setting up a Pynchon network and building a Thunderbird plugin to use it would be pretty awesome.
I think you’ve got my email (if not, shout out to me on the noisebridge list and I’ll hit you back); let’s talk.
Hey there. I thought Mixmaster had actually died. I haven’t heard much about it in years.
Thunderbird 3, which should be out in a few months, has a GREATLY eased system for writing add-ons for it (much more like Firefox 2 and 3 has). That should make things easier in that space for people that want to do things with TB.
I hadn’t heard of the Pynchon Gate before. I will have to do a google dig and find information on it
I’m happy to help people with projects by doing QA on stuff. I’m a pretty crappy coder (as I tell people) so I can’t write much of this sort of thing on my own.