12. Freenet users watch your back!

The Guardian recently ran an interesting article on ‘Freenet’ – you can read it here.

Freenet claims to provide a secure way for trusted partners to communicate online, swap files and generally stay off the radar. Burmese rebels, Tibetan dissidents, Thai ex-prime ministers, along with unlikely bedfellows such as the ALF and the National Front - basically anyone who wants to communicate anonymously or without censorship will find it useful.

Given that even having ‘Freenet’ on your computer could be incriminating in some countries, I wanted to know how easy it was to uninstall and ‘clean’ my computer of any evidence of having been a Freenet user at all. What I found surprised me.

First of all, there is talk in the scant guide offered with Freenet of ‘a panic button’ – I imagined something to hit if the heavy jackboots start thudding up the stairs. What would the panic button do? Immediately wipe all Freenet-associated files from my hard disk? Hmm, I don’t know, because I couldn’t find the panic button in the copy I downloaded and ran. Even if there was one somewhere, the fact that it isn’t under my nose means it wouldn’t be much use in a hurry.

More worrying for people who are at risk for just being Freenet users (I would think those in Burma, N. Korea, China to name an obvious few of many), is how hard it was to actually remove Freenet from my computer. The uninstaller provided with each download merely removed the program files from my Applications list into my Trash list. It did not remove them from the computer. Further, even though I was running my browser in ‘Privacy mode’, links to Freenet ‘keys’ were stored in my browser Cache history. This is particularly worrying if you don’t bother to check, since the advice from Freenet is to use a separate and dedicated browser – meaning everything in your cache will be freenet related. No need for anyone examining your computer to sort through thousands of innocuous logs to find the Freenet ones.

Still, none of that is of as much concern as this: manually deleting Freenet from my computer was not as simple as emptying the cache and Trash files. The cache went into the trash, so to speak, but the Trash folder with Freenet files in it could not be emptied from the desktop no matter what I did. Some files had been automatically locked by Freenet, and the whole Trash application froze trying to unsuccessfully delete them. In short, I had to do a ‘sudo’ from the command line to forcibly remove them, a process that if you don’t know how to do you’d better learn if you plan on using Freenet in a hostile environment. I’d also say you’d better learn how to do it quick (maybe write yourself a script), because wiping all trace of Freenet off my computer took me the best part of an hour the first time I tried it.