Tor's New Anti-Censorship Team: Defending The Open Internet

The current regime in Russia can always be relied upon to remind us daily why we all desperately need means to evade censorship:

techdirt.com
Russian Government Demands All Foreign Press Outlets Register For The Privilege Of Delivering News To Russia
Free Speech
from the get-in-the-sea,-Putin dept
Tim Cushing
26 Jun 2019

> The Russian government sure loves its registration. If anyone wants to do anything involving the written (and/or broadcasted) word in Russia, the government wants to know who you are. That makes it easier to find you should you displease the Russian government and/or its bear-riding autocrat.

If the Russian government were the only offender, our task would no doubt be easier. But nowadays it seems that pretty much every government is attempting to censor this, that, and the other, each in its own way according to the needs of its own political/financial elite.

I seem to have lost the link, but another recent story concerned an automated takedown demand system being fielded by the government of India, which apparently is not very accurate, so that at least one US polysci graduate student who wrote about political developments in Europe, without even mentioning India at all, had his account revoked owing to a complaint from IN (which of course twitter.com and facebook.com complied with unquestioningly) that he was endangering Indian national interests with his posts/tweets.

So something to add the long list of why censorship regimes are terrible: they are not even close to being even minimally accurate even by the amoral standards of the governments which create and use them.

Another thought: if every government is censoring as much as it can, each in its own way, perhaps we should think about anti-censorship, not as connecting users in country A to "the truth", but to connecting users in country A to the propaganda punted by country anti-A. Maybe We the People have lost access to "the truth", if we ever had it, but perhaps we can at least hope to balance one nations lies against another the lies told by an "adversary nation". Perhaps if we read enough lies from mutual enemies we can attempt to triangulate "the truth"?

I hope it's not really that bad of course, but with experience I've become less and less happy with the supposedly "benign" efforts of USG funded groups such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which "shape" the news in ways friendly to "US national interests".

One happy thought is that the closest approximation to "the truth" is clearly internal documents from country A (or anti-A) which were intended to be read only by "the authorities". Thus, wikileaks.org and other groups which publish leaked documents may, even yet in this awful age, offer ordinary citizens a handle on what their governments are really doing in their name to harm their individual interests and those of every other ordinary citizen on this beleaguered little blue marble which humans share with so many other life forms which human creations are in the process of killing because "leaders" like MBS and DJT don't give a damn about anyone or anything other than themselves.