Irish programmer under attack by New York Times

Ian Clarke (Freenet) fingered by journalist that set up Kevin Mitnick

Ian Clarke (the inventor of, among many other things, Freenet) has been singled out by a notorious US journalist that helped take down the US cracker Kevin Mitnick. The Freenet Project, involves a way to organise the distribution of information anonymously across computer networks in order to ensure anonymity. Now Clarke is being set up by NYT journalist John Markoff as a target of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) with claims that Freenet is not about freespeech and anonymity, but actually about trading copyrighted material. Slashdot also has a discussion on the matter which refutes this.

Markoff skews the reporting on Freenet by claiming that Clarke has changed tack from claiming to be concerned about copyright to claiming to be concerned about political censorship of dissidents. This is false as anyone that has followed the Freenet project from its inception knows.