FreedomBox and a Decentralized Internet

The things some lawyers get up to! Take Eben Moglen for instance. After working at IBM as a programmer, he attended Yale Law; then he clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, after which went back to Yale to get a Ph.D. in history; then it was on to Columbia Law and a professorship there. Enough laurels there for him to rest comfortably for pretty much ever, you’d think. But no: harking back to his early days in computers, he started the Software Freedom Law Centre in 2005 and now he’s launched the FreedomBox Foundation — which is what I want to talk about here.

Moglen is bothered by the increasing centralization of the internet, the concentration of the ways and means in a few hands, hands and devices vulnerable to governmental intervention — as we have seen in Egypt and the U.S. response to the Wikileaks brouhaha. The solution, according to Moglen, lies in the creation of an alternative internet resulting from “tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers,” as described in a recent article in the New York Times.

At the core of the idea is the “freedom box.” From the Foundation site:

Freedom Box is the name we give to a personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy.

Freedom Box software is particularly tailored to run in “plug servers,” which are compact computers that are no larger than power adapters for electronic appliances.

Located in people’s homes or offices such inexpensive servers can provide privacy in normal life, and safe communications for people seeking to preserve their freedom in oppressive regimes.

Evidently, the hardware isn’t a problem: the price might be brought down to $30. It’s the creation of software to run on these devices and to mount the necessary connections that is the challenge. Hence the FreedomBox Foundation.

You’ll find more on his plan to decentralize power over information in the Times article and on the Foundation site. With any luck, a piece of the net will be coming soon to a plug near you — thanks to a lawyer.