There's no valuable contribution that you can make to privacy unless you're willing to invent new forms of cryptography. The heart of the intelligence beast is the gatekeeper for cryptographic standards. And if you're inventing new forms of cryptography, you had best get them right, or your cryptography work is useless.
Building isolated infrastructure just means the beast will attack your infrastructure at the points you don't control. So, for example, they will just tap your traffic upstream if you refuse to comply. And, that may make your upstream disconnect you. See, there's plenty of ways they can get in your head and mess with you, as a service provider.
There is certainly no way to have privacy from the beast on the modern Internet.
Inventing new forms of cryptography is far from the only way to make a valuable contribution to privacy as a 'cause', and really, it's not even the best one. You can build secure, distributed, infrastructure without centralized points of failure, control or observation, you can raise awareness about security & privacy issues, you can lower the barrier to entry for laymen interested in privacy/security, etc.
So start building city-wide wireless mesh networks and then figure out a way of interconnecting them long-distance... of course, even though your upstream is now not sanely controllable/compromisable, they'll still be able to find another way to fuck you, but this stuff is like any kind of security: It's not about making something 'unbreakable', it's about making it prohibitively difficult to break.
Thanks for posting about Bitmessage. It is new to me. Starting to get up to speed and knowledgeable about it.
P2P isn't any layer of security. It just is kind of like everyone is a server. Distributed many servers instead of fewer centralized servers.
In regards to email, the entire hassle of reverse DNS, non moving server target, etc. poses a clear privacy and monitoring issue, so giving a server mobility, ability to change IP, etc. is a mass improvement --- but of course we are comparing email to something entirely different.
P2P/distributed systems design (if done right) does provide some level of extra security because it makes it significantly more difficult for any single organization to attack, control or monitor the entire system. If your infrastructure is federated (and why not, if you're building something distributed in the first place), then you also get '
trust agility'.
These are strange days considering modern history where the worlds largest COMMUNIST nation is hip tied to the world purported beacon of freedom and independence. After all those decades of Cold War, all that money extorted from citizen sweat, and now we lay with the commies?!?!? See, simple I say, reality isn't as it was advertised to us.
To be fair to communism, China is not particularly communist in their actions - more like some bizarre state-run capitalism. On the other hand, to be fair to capitalism, everywhere else isn't particularly capitalist (let alone actually good at being capitalist, as opposed to good at being short-sighted and stupid).
