| A/I Orange Book (1.0): An how-to for the realization of a resilient network of self-managed servers | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prev | Next | |
As early as in 2003, some members of the Autistici/Inventati collective started wondering what effects the upcoming wave of repression would have on our lives.
At that time it was clear to us that the growing importance of the digital communication media would call for the repression forces' attention, especially if connected to radical political contexts. We were far too optimistics: since then we have seen the increasing global paranoia pushing forward orwellian and panopticon ideologies towards total control, not only aiming at the restricted area of social and political dissent, but targetting the society at large.
We considered the main weak spots of the services we offered and wondered what compromises we could reach in balancing our political needs, the personal energies available in our collective and the responses required by the forecoming threats. We managed to sketch out three main problems:
On one side, since our server was hosted by commercial providers, we could not guarantee for their physical integrity and for the privacy of the data stored on their disks. On the other side, trying to move our server to other locations (private houses or social spaces) would force us to defend a physical place or an object. This second option is not self-sustainable for us and in the end does not allow for a different outcome compared to the first one. Since costs did not make it possible to deploy better solutions (like cabling some private bunker), we had to resign to considering our servers embedded in a hostile and untrustworthy environment.
The partial success of our project (at least considering the widespread use of our services) had put us in the uncomfortable position of hosting on a single box a far too large number of personal resources (as mailboxes, for example). This of course is a problem only when combined with our relative failure in spreading the use of privacy and self-protection tools as gpg, or, more generally, with our inability to encourage the protection of everyone's fundamental liberties. And with such a big number of users thinking of encrypting the server hard disk would have put us in the even worse position of having a single key for thousands of people's data. Therefore we needed to consider a more decentralized model for our services, in order to decrease the average number of users of any single box.
The national and international legal scenerio seemed to make more and more unlikely the possibility to ensure anybody's data integrity, especially considering the cases of digital data seizing. We could only assure people that they would still be able to communicate, no matter what.
We drew many conclusions from these considerations, and this document is one of them: the technical design of an infrastructure aimed at anonymous communications and based on a number of servers distributed in various parts of the world. Since we think that every physical server can be easily compromised, we have to consider each box as a disposable node of the network.