It's easy to feel that way in, say, the U.S., where only hate groups are getting censored right now, and even that only by private companies. If you think about a country like China, where for example it's hard to find anything online saying a massacre at Tiananmen Square ever happened, then the purpose of these things becomes more obvious.

The time to set up uncensorable communications is before you're being censored. After, it's a lot harder to get traction.

Websites that publish child sexual exploitation material are getting heavily censored in the U.S. too. Think through what uncensorable implies.

> Websites that publish child sexual exploitation material are getting heavily censored in the U.S. too. Think through what uncensorable implies.

To me, it implies that things you agree with and things you don't agree with cannot be censored. This seems like a prerequisite for a free society.

This is a bit meta and for that I apologise, but it's kind of interesting that the "drug addicts, paedophiles and terrorists" rhetoric seems to have lost almost all of its potency.

I found the reference to hate groups to be a much more effective argument, I think purely because everybody is so used to the kids/drugs/terror angle being overused and abused to chip away at liberties.

Surveillance-state dystopians take note.

Hate groups also seem to be much more abundant and visible. You don't see your local pedophilia lobby getting involved in politics.

That material could also be loaded on a flash drive and sent via the mail. I suppose the USPS and flash drives should be banned.

If I'm not yet censored then why wouldn't be better off saving time by using much easier tools to publish my speech?

So that's essentially a public goods problem. If the censorship-resistant tools aren't popular, they won't be there for you if the censorship does start. But you'll likely have little effect on their overall popularity by publishing your own content on them, so you do better by publishing on the easiest tools, and hoping to freeload on others building popularity of the resistant tools.

The best way to address this is probably to make the resistant tools as easy and compelling as possible.

FWIW, Tor is blocked in China.

Isn't "But think of the dissidents in China" the libertarian version of "Think of the children"?

In any case, OP was visibly grappling with a tradeoff. The question is if there are compromises, i. e. methods to make such projects more useful for the good dissident, and less so for criminals.

One idea would be to restrict the types of files: video would seem to be more useful for illegal pornography than anti-government organisation. Please note: more useful. I'm not saying video is completely useless for good causes.

You could even make features dependent on the language used, or do some rudimentary geolocation. Or correlate directly with freedom: "if Wikipedia is not blocked, your upload speeds are severly limited".

None of these are perfect, and most are easily circumvented by people with a working compiler. But But they might help mitigate the possible misuses. Denying even the possibility is just lazy.

I would say video is one of the most useful tools for dissidents. A lot of good has come from video of police abuses, for example. And if the news media isn't covering your protest, it might as well not exist unless you're able to publish your own video of the event.

This is such a Western-centric point of view. The West (largely) enjoys free speech, other countries do not. Other countries have incredibly repressive regimes...where merely questioning your government means you are either under surveillance or disappear.

That's due to Western philosophy, which itself is seems to be OK with the idea of mob rule for short periods of time before it burns out due to idiocraty. The Bonnie and Clyde phenomenon as one example, and Trump as another. No Trump supporter could stand to enter a rational debate on the subject, and even if they did, they would attempt to be irrational anyway.

Think of our philosophy as starting a fire on purpose to prevent an out of control fire later. We know we've got a bunch of rowdy idiots here, and love them for it, but every once in a while they find an amazingly lazy way to grab power and shake things up a bit - like a randomization function.

I'm still hoping 5 years later all of them will forgot what was so important and go back to discussing Jennifer Lopez's butt.

Sure. Basically, it all comes down to whether or not you trust the government to be good, always. If you believe this is the case, you're fine. If you don't, you will probably prefer un-censorable technologies. America has (historically) tended to fall pretty far to the "free speech" side of the line, though there is a push to change that.

Even if you trust the American government, people in repressive regimes can still make use of this. This could enable a western news outlet to make itself accessible to those who are brainwashed by state media.

Trying to prevent "hate groups" from congregating or criminals from opening marketplaces doesn't usually work, either. It's the prohibition principle: if you ban the tech, criminals will use it, but an American NGO won't be able to reach those with censored internet.

You may not use it, but I don't see why your "being on board with it" ought to affect what others create.

>Even if you trust the American government, people in repressive regimes can still make use of this.

I think an important point to make is that just because you trust the American government now, doesn't mean that this won't change in the future. Which is why the core tenets of free speech and privacy should be protected at all costs.

Even if you have "free speech" you could still end up on some form of subversive persons list. We're not far from McCarthy 2.0.

It is a place to discuss anything without someone removing it. Hate groups, LGBT, people for legal reasons who cannot disclose can, someone releasing information on power entities...

It is a place to find prespectives that are not allowed.

Reminds me of a star trek voyager show where bad thought has been outlawed so they have a black market for those type of thoughts. From the start there are people who want to express and someone who wants to stop them. This stops the person stopping them.

Indeed, I don't understand why anyone thinks they need freedom anymore, we've practically won. There's nothing left to have freedom from, other than the remaining vestiges of hatred we must always be fighting. There can be no freedom from justice and accountability. Obviously, these people are using freedom to mean something other than what society already provides, as if their interests were somehow more legitimate, or they were trying to preserve the seeds of hatred that we've finally made progress against. We live in a society and an international system of co-ordination, while not perfect - it is against terror and hate, and so only hate groups and other terrorists could want to limit its reach or find alternatives.

/s

I could go on, but that's about where we are.

> It just seem like a place for hate groups to unite and bad things to happen... I would love a different perspective on this

Just because the world's loudest whiners have decided that people disagreeing with them is censorship, doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate examples of actual censorship and oppression in the world.

There are plenty of countries where criticizing the government on social media results in prison, beatings or being disappeared. There are regimes that aren't above using a dissident's family members as collateral or for retribution.

You must be really excited about the current administration's effort to fight end-to-end encryption then. Can't have them thoughtcriminals spreading their wrongthink¹.

¹ definition is subject to change depending on which entity is currently in power.

Because one may want to express an opinion that isn’t sanctioned and approved by a government agency/Twitter mob/middle class moral crusaders in general?

Historically, oppressive regimes have killed and raped far more than racist groups and child pornographers.

There are other ways to investigate or deradicalize fringe extremists. There is only one way to have free speech.

Historically, a lot more people died from smallpox than aircraft crashes. Does that mean we should focus on eradicating smallpox (again) and not on airplane safety?

Oppressive regimes are not "eradicated" [0]. They exist even in our own time. There is nothing geographically special about Western countries that makes our governments better, that credit belongs to civil liberties and a culture of respecting mutual freedom.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

free speech is bad when people i dont like say things that make me uncomfy :)

Free speech includes hate speech. Ban that and you may be next.

Free speech requires anonymous speech in many places.

On the other hand where we already have free speech, I’m not a big fan of anonymous speech. Speech should be subject to the self censorship that comes from thinking about whether someone is hurt/offended/etc. Free speech means being free to say what you want without legal consequences, not without social consequences.

Thanks for the different point of views everyone. Wish this wouldn't have got down-voted by two points. Did not consider parts of the world that have government censorship, makes more sense in that case.

Any tool that can be used by dissidents will be used by hate groups.

Conversely, any method for censoring hate groups will be used against dissidents.

I used to be anti-censorship, now I'm pro-censorship because let's face it, the dissidents are fucked regardless and the fascists (and worse) are the only ones who are going to get much use out of these tools. But technological solutions to social problems aren't going to work. The computer knows nothing about the meaning of the bytes it processes. They're all just ones and zeroes.