Irish coder Ian Clarke, the inventor of a publishing system for the Netengineered to prevent censorship, is leaving the US for Europe, citingrestrictions on liberties, writes Danny O'Brien

An Irish coder who went to America to seek fortune - and found it - says he is now fleeing a country which is "going down an authoritarian path".

Ian Clarke, a 27-year-old coder and entrepreneur from Meath who moved to California in 2000, is to return to live in Europe. In a short aside on popular Net technology site slashdot.org, he said that "as an Irish citizen living in the US - I have decided that it is time to leave this country. It is starting to look, smell and act as Germany did during the 1930s".

"I didn't intend it to be read as an official statement," said Mr Clarke, "but, yes, it's true that I don't feel comfortable as a non-US citizen in the US."

Mr Clarke is the inventor of Freenet, a publishing system for the Net that is engineered to prevent censorship.

The program allows publishers and readers to serve files and browse anonymously online. The only way to remove popular information on Freenet would be to take down the entire network. The software, which is free to use and distribute, has been downloaded one-and-a-half million times, and continues to be actively maintained by Mr Clarke and other volunteer programmers.

Mr Clarke and his supporters say that the system fosters free speech, although some critics have accused it of being used as a vehicle to illicitly distribute copyrighted material and pornography.

Mr Clarke grew up in Navan, Co Meath, and studied Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Edinburgh University. Following the initial announcement of Freenet in 2000, he moved to Los Angeles, California. At the time, Freenet and other "peer-to-peer" (P2P) programs were seen as the next software investment opportunity.

"We had a lot of attention from the media companies, so it made sense to move to the centre of that industry," said Mr Clarke.

While in America, he co-founded a commercial venture, Uprizer Inc. In January 2001, the company announced $4 million in funding from investors including Intel and Kline Hawkes & Company. Mr Clarke was then 23 years old.

The brief excitement over P2P ebbed, however, as the economy went into a decline. These days the main attention paid by media companies to P2P applications is via their lawyers. US media industry groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) continue to attempt to sue P2P users and creators for file-sharing copyright infringements.

Clarke now says he feels that, in the light of Guantanamo Bay and other "circumventions of the American judicial system" by the US to non-American citizens, he is no longer comfortable remaining in the country.

"Freenet, given that it is the P2P network with an overt political aim, is the application most likely to attract attention from the authorities," he says, referring to Freenet's intention to create an uncensorable publication system.

"I have no intention of being disappeared at the behest of the Department of Justice.

"I don't see it as being very likely, but the leap from arresting someone for donating to the wrong Muslim charity to pursuing Freenet developers by claiming we support child pornography does not seem that great to me."

There is currently no evidence that the US government is investigating the Freenet development project.

Indeed, a bill passed last month in the US senate would donate $16 million (€14.2 million) to supporting systems like Freenet that could bypass the Internet-filtering software of foreign states.

Other P2P applications have, however, been vigorously pursued by the entertainment industries.

Cindy Cohn, head counsel for the US civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that "we've seen civil judgements recently where the creators of general purpose tools have been held responsible for misuse by users. But this not a settled matter."

A successful suit by the RIAA against another P2P application, Aimster, in June for copyright issues has led to fears that file-sharing applications might be sued as contributory infringers, but other courts have differed on the matter.

There has been no suggestion that criminal prosecutions of the designers of P2P networks are being considered.

Nonetheless, court cases related to the aggressive enforcement of intellectual property laws have led to many technologists becoming more concerned of the political ramifications of their work.

Cohn says that she noted concern among foreign and immigrant programmers last year after Russian coder Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI on a speaking trip to an American conference.

He was charged under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws for writing a program that unlocked the copying restrictions on electronic book software. Mr Sklyarov was later found not guilty. "But I know of some respected European programmers who have now said they won't step foot in the US," says Ms Cohn.

Mr Clarke left full-time employment at Uprizer in 2001 to form his own P2P consultancy, Cematics. He says he'll continue to work for both when he leaves the country in a few months. "I'm fortunate that I have few economic ties here. Most of our clients are European these days, and I can work at the North Pole if it has an Internet connection."

Peter Ivory, current president of Uprizer, said: "We don't share his views, but he's entitled to believe what he wants. He's always been a pretty straightforward business guy with us." Mr Clarke is still a board member with the company.

"Maybe the sun here was too much for him, and he doesn't want to admit it," Mr Ivory added.

Mr Clarke will return to Edinburgh, where as a fourth year student at the university he worked on the academic project that was to become Freenet.