Silence is Defeat doesn’t log your activity!
As far as Brunner knows, this is true. But verification is a non-trivial task. If you’re interested in copyright infringement, Silence is Defeat (SiD) looks an awful lot like a new chokepoint—the point the copyright holders can target (either the admins of that system or their ISP) for copyright infringement claims. Why trust them with your illicit activities?
But let’s assume SiD keeps no logs. Do you know who SiD’s ISP is? What reason do you have to trust them?
As for not even your ISP will know what you’re doing
, your ISP could have a record of you establishing an SSH connection to SiD’s machines which could be handy if someone is trying to put together a slightly better picture of what went down.
Hiring a third party to assist in copyright infringement isn’t going to make the infringement invisible. Using SSH isn’t going to hide as much about your activities as you’d like.
I accept and appreciate that SiD wants to assist others in free expression and introducing others to the open source movement (even though I’d prefer pointing people to the ethically-minded free software movement instead of a movement that focuses on technological efficiency aimed at a business audience). However, I’m not convinced that enough of the people involved whom SiD depends on to work are trustworthy.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of time until someone tries doing something illegal with their SiD account at work. Their work machine is probably running some proprietary OS on which (unbeknownst to them) a keylogger is also running, silently recording mouse movement and keyboard activity. Suddenly even more information comes to light, and from a wholly unexpected place—the former employer.