Ian Clarke, the 26-year-old Irish programmer/tech innovator, greatly impressed me during our 90-minute chat today. He just moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, after spending three years in Santa Monica, Calif. The reason was not so much his distaste for this administration’s foreign policy (“The joke is that I was carted off to Guantanamo,” he said) but because the corporate and government environment has become so hostile to innovators in the peer-to-peer industry in this country.
I interviewed Clarke for both a magazine article and my book, so can’t post his remarks in full, but thought I’d share this snippet, which I hadn’t heard about before:
Clarke: There’s an interesting phenomenon of bloggers on Freenet. They call themselves floggers. They can blog with total anonymity. People talk about things they can’t talk about in their normal blogs. And their postings aren’t susceptible to tracing, as can happen on the open Web.
A fascinating development worth watching. Sometimes anonymity is the only reasonable course for those want to disseminate material that authorities want suppressed.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply