The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, famously quipped in 1993. But in truth Gilmore s aphorism has been more of an ambition than a description. Although there are many ways to place information on the Internet anonymously, every Web page and computer file resides on a server.
Every server has an owner.
And with a court order and armed agents, a government can find that owner. Publius makes Gilmore s idea practical by changing the way the Web works in three ways. Third, it encodes each file so that any alteration to it can be detected. The first step is the trickiest. Currently, a Web page is copied directly to the computer that will serve it up to the public.