"Us tech people" are the ones enabling them to censor though. From the article: "Facebook this year removed 159 accounts at Vietnam’s behest, while YouTube took down 4,500 videos, or 90 percent of what the government requested".

On that same thread, Cisco built the Chinese Golden Shield which is what now is refer to the great chinese firewall iirc.

That's nonsense. Countries are responsible for making up their own laws, not foreign techies.

I think it behooves all techies to reread and really think about the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace every now and then:

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

I am deeply against censorship, consider myself a libertarian and wouldn't personally work for Facebook. I deeply sympathise with this manifesto. But I'm also a consequentialist and I believe the Vietnamese are overall better served with a censored Facebook/Youtube than no Facebook/Youtube at all. I also don't believe that getting 100% of techies on our side is a realistic strategy.

It definitely isn't. There's also the "something you build can be used for evil or for good" aspect, too.

When I say enable, I am talking about stateless nonprofits creating platforms where people can communicate freely, express themselves freely, and if they need to - organize protests to protect their freedoms. Things like Signal are great steps toward it, but we need more.

If you are from the US, be aware that even United States spies on its citizens, and recently-activated social media screening is just another step towards it.

sorry to break it to you some citizens can be traitors relaying on the "I know his people" and he's a good chap belongs to the right club does't work as a vetting procedure as we found in the UK with the cambridge 5 and others

I agree, but this is a slippery slope, and be mindful that warrantless surveillance is technically illegal (or not, i don't know what patriot act brought these days). It's a slippery slope because there is no end to it. It starts with surveillance - which evades privacy, then comes your freedom of speech, then your freedom to choose.

Oh I agree on warrantless wire tapping the one of problems with the states is they don't separate the Police role of the FBI from is Security / Contra Espionage.

Just following orders huh?

Most of the time, these companies are actually stronger than the government, even if they are not, there are a lot of ways they can choose to resist the orders.

>I feel it's on us tech people to enable them the free speech they deserve.

It's clearly not a technical problem, so it's foolish to try to find a technical solution. This kind of silicon valley elitist Tellerism is doing more harm than good in cases like these.

Actually, it is. It is very much a technical problem. Technology has not yet provided a super-fast, truly decentralized, perfectly uncensorable “Internet for All” solution. If we had that, a lot of this discussion would be moot.

Someone in Dalat could teach Vietnamese to any number of foreigners, without any adversary being the wiser. Anyone in China could read up on Tiannenmen Square or the “Free Tibet” movement without fear of arrest. People in Indonesia could watch any film they wish.

“Laws” in any country on this planet are not immutable, immaculate/divine, absolute, or axiomatic. They can and should be changed — regardless of the concerns of those in power. And the only reliable way to ensure change is education, information and discussion — all unfettered, uncensored and unbridled.

Until technology guarantees that, we as ‘techies’ have not delivered. And please, don’t tell me about Tor and “teh darkwubs” — that is not a realistic solution for 99% of the online population — too slow and still not bulletproof.

Technology needs to do better.

Very well said, thank you.

As for tor and the dark web, more important than being fast & solid is ease of use. If we design platforms, protocols, etc by default to be censorship free, then many projects to fill gaps will follow. Tor was an attempt, but failed at widespread adoption, maybe we need something smaller to begin with. E2E encrypted chat apps was a good first step, we need more.

We take many things here in the US for granted. When I go back to my home country, I feel odd sense of insecurity, now imagine people living there for their whole lives - they take censorship as normal and go with it. With censorship comes with censored imaginations, research and so on.

The scenario you're describing is unlikely to be deliverable.

Any system sufficiently user-friendly to be accessible to the bulk of the global populace is also user-friendly to government authority. Because inevitably, passwords get misplaced and authentication / authorization tokens get forgotten or stolen, and then the average user needs an authority to turn to to re-establish their connection to the network.

Don't get it. I have been giving example of a "chat app" that's e2e encrypted. If it's easy to use, but solid to do proper e2e, government cannot do anything. Especially if messages also can "disappear" after a day. Government stops you, inspect your phone, cannot find anything. At least there is some reasonable doubt. Granted, if oppressive government has a reasonable doubt about you, you might have hard time otherwise, but that won't scale to large populations.

Similarly, if internet was designed with privacy in mind, things would have been different. If your favorite news site were available through tor, and you were using nontracking browser, you'd probably be fine.

Giving them a platform to freely communicate is not nothing. I think you were looking for an excuse to blame sv people.