Imagine this...
You join a network and, as part of your membership in that network, you get a small storage device which you hook up to your Internet connection. That storage device already has some computer programs on it that you don't need to worry about. You just turn the device on and then use your computer as you normally would choosing to use your little box as a primary storage unit or as a back-up. Of course, you're not really saving it to the box because your data is now distributed to all the computers on the network in little pieces. You can retrieve it quickly if you need to (as quickly as you could from your computer's drive) but most of it is not on that box anymore. It's on someone else's box and someone else's data is on yours. You have no idea whose data is there and no idea where yours is.
This means that if government officials walk into your home and take the box, they aren't going to know what's on it and they can't get that information from you since you don't know either.
The approach to sharing pieces of files among various computer is called "peer to peer file sharing" and is also very much available. It's the concept used by http://www.bittorrent.org/">BitTorrent, the remarkable file-sharing protocol developed by Bram Cohen. Bit Torrent now functions as the most popular file-sharing system on the Internet with click here">as many users as Facebook and YouTube viewers combined. You download files from a bunch of other computers on a network, most of the time in small pieces each stored on a different computer. The Bit Torrent protocol switches the storage source constantly during the download and, as if by magic, you end up with one file.
BitTorrent, by the way, doesn't mask your IP address (the numbers that identify you while you're on the Internet) so it's not "privacy-proof" but a BitTorrent compatible protocol called http://www.oneswarm.org/">One Swarm does just that and there are many approaches in development to making you "anonymous" as you share files.
The distribution protocol is there. So is the storage protocol. All that's needed to make this a reality is the network of people willing to participate. But the companies that sell Cloud storage are frantically trying to recruit the entire Internet to their bank-account-expanding services, thereby making distributed network that much more difficult to recruit to. The fact that most people, activists or not, have no idea how any of this works makes things adds to the difficulty.
But what if an activist movement was to decide that such a project was worth organizing? What if some Internet organization were to develop and launch this kind of network? What if a bunch of progressive Internet providers were to establish a coordination that would make it happen?
Now that's an idea that would blow away the clouds and reveal a pretty sunny sky of Internet privacy and protection.
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