Anti-Freenet Cops at my Church at 2:00am
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So here's the story:

I had been given permission to use the church facilities for entertainment and missions work. I was using The Freenet Project (now called Hyphanet) to work on missions on Freenet. My friend wasn't really into the ministry stuff so he was playing games on their high-end computer system. It was a good night and we were in no ways getting ourselves into any trouble. We were both doing nothing illegal at all, whatsoever. The time came to go back to my friend's house to get some shut-eye. When we walked out of the church a cop was in the church's driveway. I asked her what she wanted and what she was doing there. She mentioned that she had been waiting outside the church to make sure that nothing shady was going on. Time passed, and she revealed that she was there for the purpose of checking into our Internet usage. I informed her in no uncertain terms, emphatically, that we were doing nothing illegal, nothing of the sort. I got frustrated that my friend and I were being surveilled just because The Freenet Project was being surveilled. Now I had been doing nothing wrong but I shut down the Freenet node because I didn't want to deal with this drama anymore. So without a doubt at that point, several decades ago, the Freenet Project network as so surveilled that they could track down our Internet Protocol (IP) address and be able to send a cop to the location in short order.

So take this as a real-life lesson. If a cop can be sent to the physical address location of an arbitrary node connected to the Freenet Project then you can be quite certain that your meta-data is out there and is being actively exploited. Darknets can be surveilled, and are surveilled, and their collection of meta-data can lead the authorities to investigate anything linked to that darknet connection. Take heed, The Man is watching.

Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

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