It's not quite as simple as that. Mass surveillance alone harms free speech because it affects people's behaviour. If you know everything you say and do is recorded, you tend to say and do a lot less than you would otherwise.

>If you know everything you say and do is recorded

Intelligence agencies didn't want us to know that, we learned it from whistleblowers.

Intelligence agencies are full of smart people. They know that secrets this big can't be kept indefinitely. Once the cat's out of the bag, then the panopticon comes into effect. They have factored in the effect on free speech into their decisions.

And it's not even that bad in principle. In a more perfect world you want to have is freedom of speech and an organization like S.H.I.E.L.D. which secretly scoops all communication to protect the public from greater threats. Unfortunately, what we got instead is a kind of Hydra that lacks ambition for world domination.

GCHQ ABSOLUTELY promote censorship and interference with free speech on a mass scale:

https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-...

Educate yourself! The GCHQ is a reprehensible organ of an authoritarian state! Under no circumstances must we allow those who grant themselves the privilege of extreme secrecy, the further miscreant privilege of rampant social engineering - of which censorship is but a minor aspect!

The UK government does block websites, but I think you are right that it doesn't amount to censorhip in the sense of blocking criticism of the UK government itself.

I'm not sure what role GCHQ has with regard to blocking websites or if we know what they actually advocate. They have been known to do things clandestinely ;-)

I think it would be naïve to say that it doesn't have a chilling effect.

Can you have freedom without having privacy?