Privacy and darknets

Today I've spent most of the day researching darknets and the technologies that enable them. Long since gone is the environment in which the original napster was created and now, in these days where the RIAA and it's ilk are constantly suing people the geeks have been brought out in force to combat them. The plethora of available technologies is fairly intimidating, even for a geek like myself it took a number of hours to read up on all the different protocol specs and get to the hard facts about various implementations and the real pro's and con's of each. The question I imagine most of the non geeks ask, is why bother? Bruce Schneier wrote this essay which I think fairly well elucidates why privacy is important to me. I often find myself holding views that are fairly unconventional and in many situations that can actually be a serious hazard to my health, but most importantly it impacts HOW I think. If we are all concerned about how our own thoughts, words or expression could be misused or interpreted then the very fabric of freedom is torn asunder. So I'm going to build myself a darknet, if you're interested you can see my thoughts on what i've read here.