[steenreem]

So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible?

I imagine a system where you publish news using your device (a mobile phone), and encrypted in a way so that only a small group of other devices, which you have explicitly trusted in an earlier step, can decrypt it, allowing only them to trace that the news came from you.

Then those trusted devices will decrypt and re-encrypt the news in such that they can forward it with only their trusted devices. When a device receives news from another, then it won't know whether the sender published that news, or is merely forwarding it.

Because all communication between devices is encrypted, a device can not be confirmed to be using this system, except by a device who he trusts.

When a device is compromised, he will only be able to see if another device is part of the system, if that device has trusted him. Also the compromised device will be able to read news shared to him, but he won't be able to see what device that news originates from.

To make sure that readers can filter news based on what publishers they like, there is the concept of a publisher.

Apart from news, devices can also share publishers. An publisher is a name plus public key. The creator of the publisher has the private key with which he can encrypt news (even before it encrypted for sharing), allowing readers of that news, who have the publisher's public key, to verify that the news came from that publisher. If a publisher is shared with a device while the device already knows a publisher with the same public key, then the device must chose which publisher to keep and which to delete.

[Tuna-Fish]

This is how China would attack such a system:

Declare use and possession of it illegal. Randomly search for it among people who they think might have it. Once they find people using it, they punish them very harshly, and widely publicize the consequences of using such a system. Then people will stop using it, because CPC is more than willing to ratchet up the penalties and enforcement until that happens. Up to summary death penalty and massive dragnets where military descends on an area to search every device they find. (The fact that everyone knows they would go that far means they'd never have to.)

There are no technical solutions to tyranny. You can think of such a system working because you live in a country where there is likely a constitution that prevents governments from banning apps they don't like without any actual real justification, and where there are laws that prevent anything you have from being seized for inspection just because the people doing the inspection feel like it.

There is plenty of dissent of all kinds in China. But the locals would never do something so brazen as to start using an app specifically designed to make their communication uncensorable. Because that would be a direct challenge to the state, and the state has a very well documented, extremely blood-soaked history of winning direct challenges through applying brute force.

Instead, the dissent uses the officially approved channels, and stays near the officially approved limits.

[anon57325]

Such a system could also be attacked in a democracy.

Just look at how the US government handled the Liberty Dollar.

It would be even easier now with National Security Letters and Secret Courts. Heck, look what happened to Lavabit.

[Tuna-Fish]

True. My point was that in a democracy, it would be attacked in a different way, and the post I was replying to was thinking about defending from the kind of attacks that would be done in a democracy. China has other tools.

[DevX101]

Keep in mind that a sufficiently motivated and powerful state (China comes to mind) could block any messages that appear to be encrypted.

In such a case, bad state actors would not be able to decipher the message, but they could determine that you attempted to send an unlawful message.

US had stringent regulations on high levels of cryptography until recently, so the U.S. isn't immune to this train of thought either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

[Macuyiko]

Indeed. Or they would just pass by the app developer to have a tea and 'request' a backdoor.

All these armchair technical solutions are nice to conjure up, but at the end of the day it's not the technical aspect which is the challenge.

[tachyonbeam]

xkcd comic comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/538/

It's true that technical solutions are not a solution to tyranny. I still think it's good that these solutions might give a slight advantage to people who could make a difference.

[apatters]

It bears mentioning that services like Radio Free Asia have been broadcasting into China via shortwave and have been an uncensored source of news for decades. Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to jam these broadcasts, I'm not sure how successful those efforts are in 2018. I suspect more funding for these organizations can only help however.

(Bonus fact: Radio Free Asia contributed most of the initial funding for the development of the Signal protocol!)

[eiaoa]

> Tuning into a shortwave broadcast is more anonymous than the Internet will ever be and easily accomplished with a cheap common, legal device... a radio.

My sense is that analog methods are the best response to authoritarian regimes; and the best way to prepare for the advent of one is to familiarize yourself with analog spy trade-craft (and analog response to digital spying, like disguise).

Speaking of which, does anyone have any non-fiction book recommendations about analog spycraft and responses to authoritarianism? Things like how to do dead drops, samizdat, clandestine distribution of literature and the like?

[lic-defender]

I'd like to hear more about this, too. I would probably start looking for non-fiction about the Soviet Union and East Germany. My intuition is that the human factor is more important than the spycraft. In other words, how do you know who agrees with you politically? How do you know if you can trust them? They could be an informant for the police.

There's a scene from The Man In The High Castle season 1 where some of the Japanese are trying to figure out if the antique salesman shares their political beliefs. To give an opening, they ask questions sort of in the subject area, but plausibly deniable. He fails the test, but even if he passes, he can't just come straight out. It would be based on subtleties of words, facial expressions, attitude, maybe a joke in response. Even then, he's better off if there's not a Nest or an Alexa recording the whole thing.

Related, I heard about a man who was handing out political brochures on a street in the Soviet Union. Before too long, the police came and took him into custody. To their surprise, the brochures were blank inside. When they asked the man what was going on, he said, "everyone already knows!". But they can't talk about it.

[anon57325]

Uncensored but not unbiased. Until 2013, Radio Free Asia and other Voice of America related broadcasts were banned in the US since it was considered propaganda.

[eiaoa]

> Uncensored but not unbiased. Until 2013, Radio Free Asia and other Voice of America related broadcasts were banned in the US since it was considered propaganda.

That's just wrong. For one, VOA/RFA/etc. aren't "banned" and it's hard to believe how they could be without active jamming. They're were just forbidden to direct their broadcasts at American audiences. The concern was that the government should not be in the business of competing with existing American media organizations. If there was any concern about the content of the broadcasts, it appears to have stemmed from the idea that the State Department, which used to run it, had too many communists in it.

[wcoenen]

There is already a stronger version of this where you don't need to trust any nodes: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en

China attempts to detect and block such TOR connections. It's an arms race of detection heuristics vs traffic obfuscation.

[abc-xyz]

Right now I think GitHub is the best way to share news that the Chinese government doesn't like, because it's the only Western platform that they rely on and are afraid to ban.. that being said, I doubt a Microsoft-owned GitHub will protect the users the same way GitHub did before the acquisition.

[flap]

too late, github is already banned in China

[abc-xyz]

No it's not. Just asked my friends in China and tested with https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin... (try with github.com and reddit.com). The Chinese are heavily invested in GitHub, so if/when they do ban it then you can be sure it won't go unnoticed.

[yorwba]

GitHub has been banned in the past and yes it didn't go unnoticed ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700 ), but that's not much consolation when you suddenly can't access it. Currently they mostly don't block it ( https://en.greatfire.org/https/github.com ), but if GitHub ever became popular among ordinary citizens (as opposed to programmers) downloading e.g. censorship circumvention tools from GitHub, they'd probably find a way to mirror most git repos, except those they want to block.

[abc-xyz]

Indeed, and they've resorted to DDoSing GitHub precisely because it's so difficult (in terms of value lost) for them to block it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub).

Sure, they could setup a selfhosted GitLab and mirror repos, but doing so would severely hurt them.

[est]

Kids these days forgot how Google or Gmail was banned.

Yeah it's very difficult to "block Google" and they are "afraid are afraid to ban" Gmail.

Why makes you think that a gov use tanks against its own people have anything to fear?

[hevi_jos]

I believe you are forgetting something important: humans. You are focusing in technology without people.

Technology without people does not work. Specially in China: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png Most devices in China cheap enough are compromised as they are manufactured by the Government, the channel is compromised. The apps are compromised, social media is compromised.

You can trust no body but your family, as simple as that, not even your family as the Government can blackmail them.

[EliRivers]

So, what would be an effective way of making censorship impossible?

Tangentially, should it be impossible? We can all imagine scenarios where we might think that actually some information should be withheld or erased.

[claudiawerner]

This is an interesting question; almost everyone agrees that real child pornography should be censored, but there is only varying agreement (among liberals) on the matter of state secrets, intellectual property, assault, calls to violence...

[EliRivers]

Interesting watching the votes go up and down. There are those who strongly disagree; an axiom upon which to burn the whole world and all the people in it, one might say.

[wnscooke]

They can turn off the Internet. They've done it before in Xinjiang. Just, poof, no more internet or mobile data connections! The only thing that worked were roaming sims from HK, but even those were targetted and blocked after some time.

[dangerboysteve]

Hey, Will this tarnish my social credit score ?