Publius Home Page. The original Publius was the pen name of the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers. The new Publius is a system developed by AT&T Lab researchers to evade potential censorship of web content and provide a “high degree of anonymity” to publishers. If I understand the explanation rightly, it works by encrypting a document and distributing its content among a number of servers who host random-looking shares of the document with no idea what they are hosting. The publishing process produces a special URL that readers use to retrieve a proportion of the shares of the document sufficient to reconstruct it. The underlying principle — of encrypting and distributing content among several servers — has previously been articulated among the “cypherpunk” movement, and other schemes to achieve this are also being tried, but the Publius system seems to be a more sophisticated implementation…if it works.

Suppressing the presence on the web of a Publius-published document would require securing the cooperation of the operators of however many servers the content had been divided among — difficult but not unthinkable, it would appear. So much for the C-h-u-r-c-h o-f S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y’s war on unsalutory web content, for example. Of course, the method could be used to disseminate undesirable content, such as child pornography or materials pirated or otherwise in violation of copyright — the price of freedom? Could this be a largely unstoppable way to bear witness to a repressive political regime, sort of a twenty-first century samizdat system? The Publius system will be given away for free when ready. The developers of the process are seeking Publius Server volunteers for a two-month live trial beginning at the end of July.