1M5’s mission is to protect freedom of speech, expression, association, and assembly over electronic communications for all beings by ethical sustainable means.
Invisible Matrix Service (1M5 using leet) is the first decentralized services platform with intelligent routing between anonymity networks to fight censorship. This is required as a base level for electronic communications to ensure freedom of speech, expression, association, and assembly using this medium. Censorship resistance is accomplished by currently using Tor and I2P and in the future to include 1DN (a direct wireless ad-hoc network), Radio, and Satellite as well as other future anonymity networks. When a user’s device gets blocked on one network, other networks are used to route around the block until another user’s device can make the request. To ensure 1M5 doesn’t get shutdown, it is not registered in any jurisdiction and thus is only a shared global mission between those that wish to support freedom of speech, expression, association, and assembly among all beings. Aligning with and following any laws of a particular jurisdiction would create a leverage over the mission ending its ability to sustain it. A call for operating the mission with common ethical principles such as the non-aggression principle and voluntaryism (voluntary relationships) is key. Working with any entity known for aggression, especially of the systemic sort, is forbidden by the community as it compromises our ethics.
When the Berlin wall was opened in November 1989, expectations of a more open human society sprang forward. Yet several decades later we are experiencing digital walls being raised by governments and large corporations in the name of protection. These walls promote segregation and censorship of information while having a negative effect on creativity, innovative technology, and freedom of speech, expression, association, and assembly.
Freedom of Speech - a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction. The term "freedom of expression" is sometimes used synonymously but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used.
Censorship - the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or "inconvenient" as determined by government authorities or by community consensus.
Constraining the free flow of information between people is a direct threat to our freedom and censorship of communications on-line is growing world-wide.
- https://internetfreedomwatch.org/timeline/
- https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is-advancing-under-trump/
- https://rsf.org/en/news/more-100-websites-blocked-growing-wave-online-censorship
On-line communications are censored at the point of entrance by Internet Service Providers (ISP). They act as gateways to the internet providing governments control over speech by having the ability to restrict usage and track people's usage via their leased IP addresses. In order to make tracking usage much more difficult, tools have come out that provide techniques called onion-/garlic-routing where the source and destinations of internet routes can not be determined without breaking encryption, a very expensive feat, sometimes impossible today when considering the encryption algorithms used.
Many governments are using IP (Internet Protocol) geo-fencing (e.g. China’s Great Firewall) to isolate people from global information and mass surveillance (e.g. US’ NSA Prism and China’s Social Credit System) to increase self-censorship. These systems are now being replicated by many other governments world-wide and governments are working together to oppress the masses globally (e.g. Five/Fourteen Eyes).
Privacy, the bedrock of freedom, is being lost at an alarming rate and few know how to maintain it today. Most large organizations (e.g. tech giants, the banking industry, governments) track, persist, and use our behavior for their profit not ours. Whistleblowers, the abused, visible minorities, and a myriad of other people could be emboldened by anonymity to speak out in a manner that would otherwise be unavailable if they were forced to identify themselves. Decentralized applications like Bitcoin are helping to wrestle some control from centralized organizations although they are difficult to maintain anonymity at the network layer. Smartphones, our primary means of global communication and collaboration, are weak in maintaining our anonymity and privacy - critical to ensuring individual freedom.
Two primary tools today that support anonymity are Tor and I2P, both internet overlays. Tor provides a browser that makes it easier to use while I2P is much less known. Both are complementary in that Tor was designed for browsing today's current web sites anonymously while I2P was designed for peer-to-peer communications within I2P. Neither have good APIs for developers to embed in their products making uptake slow for many applications.
A third tool on the horizon is one that completely circumvents ISPs by not using them. They're called direct wireless ad-hoc networks and they can communicate directly phone-to-phone using technologies such as WiFi Direct. Firechat is an example used during the 2014 Hong Kong protests after the Chinese government threatened to shutdown the internet in that area.
Meshing solutions provide access to multiple networks to benefit from each network’s strengths but none provide an anonymous mesh. New mesh solutions are popping up including RightMesh that seek to improve on earlier designs. But the technology is still in its infancy and needs to be pulled into ever day applications more easily once they've matured.
Even getting these technologies in wide use doesn't solve the problem of online censorship. People in governments, corporations, and others are constantly finding ways to circumvent these technologies to censor and steal information.
Tech-savvy people can always find a way to bypass censorship and maintain privacy, but the overwhelming majority can not thus preventing a critical mass to make positive change on a political level globally. What’s needed is to bring censorship resistance and data privacy to this overwhelming majority so that all people are not only able to become free, but that they can remain so.
1M5 is at its core a mission to ensure free speech, expression, association, and assembly. What's our core beliefs that drive us?
- EVERYONE, including criminals and unethical people, have a natural right to Freedom of Speech, Expression, Association, and Assembly
- All relationships must be voluntary
- Privacy is the bedrock of freedom - we should be able to communicate as we please privately - anonymity as a base
- Transparency in code/governance
- We own our data and should be the ones that profit from it
- Self-sovereign identity – people must establish and maintain their own identities, not by 3rd parties
- Self-sovereign money – people must be their own bank indebted to no one with the keys to their money
What do we try to achieve? Prioritized...
- Support sharing of and access to information without being censored.
- Support sharing of and access to information without fear of being persecuted.
- Support person-to-person/peer-to-peer (P2P) communication without the need to depend on servers nor the internet - The People’s Direct Network - cut the cord to ISPs for good.
- Provide a self-sovereign identification system so that reputation can be established where necessary while the keys are owned and maintained by the individual.
- When information about a user is desired from a 3rd party (e.g. marketer, government consensus),that information can be sold to the 3rd party by the owner yet with/without personally identifiable information (PII) being transferred by choice.
- Provide a platform that monetizes itself to ensure sustainability.
The internet was not designed for anonymity, it must be baked into the system from the beginning at the lowest of levels to ensure it can be provided under all circumstances.
Provide a decentralized application (Dapp) platform that is fully open-source in the public domain with absolutely no copyright (to avoid states claiming copyright protection), both software and hardware, for decentralized applications that run without depending on servers sharing only what the owner specifically allows while also being created outside of manufacturers influenced by bad actors (e.g. open-source hardware / 3D printing) to ensure privacy while maintaining code and hardware transparency. Targeted hardware for dapps should be recommended based on openness, e.g. Purism.
Dapp platform supports a base level of services for running its framework and the minimal services for ensuring mission success. This includes a Sensors Service that provides intelligent routing across anonymity networks. It should be pluggable as new sensors come online. The platform should also support pluggable services for providing additional functionality as dapps require, e.g. a decentralized content distribution network (DCDN) could be implemented as service deployed to the platform ensuring its nodes can communicate uncensored.
The identification system will be self-sovereign and reputation based to ensure privacy is maintained while allowing relaxation of privacy incrementally as desired as trust grows. Both machines and people can have identities. Both should be able to use identities anonymously, psuedo-anonymously, selectively, or fully open to everyone (public). Identities can be generated by the platform or brought to the platform as well as the ability to use those identities with other platforms – open standard identity technology will be well supported, e.g. OpenPGP.
Support individuals voluntarily selling parts of their personal information while ensuring it remains secure on their flash drives. If a user loses their device, their new device will be able to restore itself with no loss of data. Ensure the platform can monetize itself by monetizing resources - network bandwidth, cpu cycles, and persistent storage - through the use of an internal token to represent them. Donations are fine for getting the core on its feet, but long-term sustainability requires self-monetization.
This is a community led mission driven by privacy and censorship-resistance needs of the community. Community members are either donating or prospecting. Prospecting members are supportive of the mission and recognize the need to be part of the community but have yet been able to provide donations. Donations are provided through relatively private means. Anonymous donations are also supported.
This effort is structured as a decentralized autonomous mission and as such is not confined to any jurisdiction as it would risk alienating individuals and providing a vector for attack. This doesn’t mean that others will not attempt to exercise control over it. No one person speaks for the natural right to free speech, expression, association, and assembly and this mission seeks to uphold that natural right. Therefore, no one individual can represent 1M5 just as no one person represents that natural right.
To be an active member of this mission requires understanding of how it operates and acceptance of and responsibility for any potential risks to self.
Decentralized autonomous missions are new efforts having no state supporting them and therefore none of the protections that come along with registering with a state. Each jurisdiction may come up with laws on dealing with these missions or similar efforts in the future. It is the responsibility of each member to handle these relationships as they see best to protect themselves.
No warranties are offered and no one person can represent this mission.
All internal disputes shall be resolved within the mission through arbitration agreed to by all members involved. External issues are to be dealt with by the mission as a whole through unanimous membership consensus otherwise they will not be dealt with. Members of this mission seek ethics over laws as laws are normally created with assumed consent of those they’re made in name of (‘the public’) but not explicit thereby rendering them outside of any formal contract and therefore unethical. Ethics are based on upholding the non-aggression principle (NAP).