Freenet / Hyphanet Cases

Brad Novreske is a leading defense expert on child pornography prosecutions arising from Freenet, the anonymous peer-to-peer network now known as Hyphanet. He has litigated these cases at the trial stage, serves as a consultant to defense attorneys in Freenet/Hyphanet cases charged in state and federal courts across the country, and has provided training to defense lawyers on how these investigations work and how to challenge them.

Why these cases are different. Freenet/Hyphanet is a decentralized network designed for anonymity. Content is broken into small encrypted blocks and distributed across the computers of participants, and every user's computer automatically relays encrypted traffic on behalf of other users — often without any knowledge of what is passing through. Law enforcement cannot observe downloads directly the way it can on conventional peer-to-peer networks. Instead, investigators run modified nodes that log the requests they receive from directly connected peers and then apply a statistical model to those logs, inferring that a neighboring computer was probably the original requester of a file rather than merely an intermediate relay.

That word — probably — is where these prosecutions are vulnerable. The government's conclusion that a particular person requested contraband rests not on direct observation but on assumptions built into the investigative software and the mathematics behind it. Whether those assumptions hold, what the true false-positive rate is, and whether the affidavits supporting search warrants accurately described the technique's limitations are all questions that most defense attorneys — and most courts — have never been equipped to examine. Brad has spent years litigating exactly these questions, including discovery battles over the investigative software itself, challenges to the reliability of the government's statistical claims, and Fourth Amendment litigation over warrants obtained on the strength of them.

The litigation posture matters. Because the flaws in a Freenet investigation are technical and attack the original search warrant, they are easy for trial counsel to miss. Novreske Law Office handles Freenet/Hyphanet issues at every procedural stage: pre-charge and trial defense, suppression litigation, direct appeal, state collateral attack, and federal postconviction review to the extent possible.

For defense attorneys. Brad regularly consults with counsel of record in Freenet/Hyphanet cases nationwide — reviewing discovery, identifying the technical and constitutional issues specific to these investigations, assisting with suppression motions and expert challenges, and providing training. If you represent a client in one of these cases, an early consultation can shape the entire defense.

These prosecutions sit at the intersection of the Fourth Amendment and evolving technology, an area where the law is unsettled and still being made. Few cases reward specialized knowledge as much as these do; the details of how the evidence was generated are, in many cases, the whole case. Broader representation in this area is described on the child pornography and CSAM defense page.