Suppose I’m the leader of North Korea.
I just heard of the safe network for the first time.
After reading a bit about it, I decide to do the following:
I create a safe network community.
I whitelist those hard_coded_contacts.
All other IPs are blocked.
Now I have a North Korean safe network that’s free from any content of any other safe network.
And thus it’s perfect for my authoritarian government and it’s decentralized to boot, so I can own all the cool domain names and have all domain names in Hangul.
No dictator is so idiotic to create a network where communications are encrypted by default.
What every dictator wants is to control and spy all communications and today’s internet allows it. A copy of the Safe Network, not.
Isn’t a mini clearnet a lot harder to build and maintain than relying on the freely available code of the safe network?
There’s more benefit to the safe network than just encryption. You have better cryptocoin capabilities and a network where I can decide how much each person can upload every day.
Also, I don’t about how the safe network encrypt it’s data, but I assume a key is needed.
Can’t my government just rewrite the safe network in such a way that all private keys are first stored in my private cloud?
The core of what makes the SAFE Network what it is, is privacy, security and freedom by default. The overall structure as well as all the pieces work in synergy to accomplish this. What you are describing is nothing like SAFE.
This post is slightly dated, but gives you an idea of the network structure from an encryption/default-security angle. Exact implementation has altered a bit, but the post is still basically accurate. I recommend it regularly.
The only use case I see for a government is to store their own data in a way that it would be accessible anywhere, but at the same time it would be hard for competing governments to spy on.
Technically, there is little difference between an office LAN and the internet. If you want to create a private network, it is relatively trivial to create something inbetween (from a design perspective).
If China wanted to firewall out the rest of the world, they could pretty much just cut the cord where said traffic goes. Obviously, it rather throws out the baby with the bath water, but tyrannical leaders may try it (in China or elsewhere).
There certainly is a very good usecase for government or other large organisations creating their own secure internet based on SAFE. Particularly for orgs with thousands of PCs on desks around the globe with spare capacity.
And contrary to the first 2 responders you could get your programmers to remove the encryption of data, or to use known encryption keys only.
But to me the bigger question is why would it be a concern to us. They can get similar results with large “dropbox” equivalents and they run them. The advantage is not really there for any government or business to run SAFE in that manner. There is no advantage and potential disadvantages like private messaging even it unencrypted.
The more the dictator has to modify SAFE the less desirable it becomes and simply owning/running the email servers and “DropBoxes” would be simpler and less change of people bypassing the dictator.
As David says and I agree it is better for them to use the global SAFE network because that means their data is more secure and less able to be discovered.