There are at least two good reasons to be concerned about hierarchy. On the one hand, privacy - if a communication channel is centralised at a single point, control of that single point (e.g. your ISPs mail server) is enough to control communication on the whole channel. On the other hand, avoiding censorship - centralised services are clearly much easier to censor.
That's where peer 2 peer comes in - if communication is entirely distributed, then there is no single central point which can be easily controlled. The cloud like nature of a distributed network also makes privacy easier to achieve - if your communication on the Internet takes the form of simply depositing and retrieving (encrypted) documents from a 'cloud' of servers, it is not possible for anyone to tell who you are communicating with.
Also, clearly a 'cloud' of distributed servers makes censorship near impossible - it is not possible to be certain that a document is eliminated without eliminating the entire cloud.
The last year has seen an explosion of peer 2 peer technologies - like the file sharing service Gnutella, or the anonymous, distributed, encrypted store Freenet. Up till now, it has been difficult to keep an eye on developments in the field - infoAnarchy now provides a single place to check for interesting developments.
Given the importance of peer 2 peer for privacy, anonymity and censorship-avoidance, I'd recommend that anyone interested in those topics keeps an eye on this forum and tries out the tools being developed. The strength of a distributed 'cloud' is closely related to how many people use it. If we all take steps to ensure that our communications are *by default* secure and anonymous, it will make projects like FBI's Carnivore sniffer technology, and traffic analysis of communications (a tactic which was used against the 1984-5 miners strike in the UK) much more difficult.
Peter P.S. I don't actually think anyone is 'watching me' - I just don't want anyone to have that ability. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B