And while your at it please answer this ignorant question. If the government of any country wanted you to freeze peoples accounts until they provided proof of idedntity, can they legally force you to?
The nightmare scenario would be if, say, some foreign government declares some Ripple account held by someone who has violated that country's laws and insists we freeze that account. They could perhaps bring an action in a United States court or even threaten the lives of OpenCoin employees. If the network was decentralized, we'd have no ability to freeze accounts or make changes except in our own servers, which would just get outvoted by other servers.
More likely methods of governmental attack:
Domain seizure: Simply take over the .com, .net, or .org address.
Freeze settlement: Using a court order, prevent gateways from settling / redeeming IOUs back into the banking system for specific individuals.
Surrender private keys: Using a court order, force a gateway to turn over the private keys to their wallet (or go to jail).
As with Bitcoin, the gateways are points of failure although to a lesser degree. But there will always be a "largest gateway", or the gateway that has the largest amount of assets on deposit / IOUs issued. A gateway always exposes a surface against which government force can be used. A government can disrupt gateway activities and cause its IOUs to become worthless. This could cause a loss of confidence in Ripple in general, and a wave of withdrawals, with other gateways going bankrupt or otherwise unable to conduct business. Similar to the recent Bitcoin crash from $266 to $57.
