Investigating TLS Blocking in India | Hacker News Reader

Investigating TLS Blocking in India

ooni.org

210 pointsZnZirconium128 comments

I'm one of the authors of the post, we're trying to extend this work by crowdsourcing censorship measurements from different vantage points in India.

We've compiled these tests into an android app, please consider running it if you live in India and would like to contribute to the research :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatc...

It's completely anonymous, doesn't require any permissions, and does not store any user related information.

Do i have to keep it installed or is it a one-off thing

You can delete it after running. Each run on an (ISP, state) combination gives a new test point.

Thanks!

Off-topic but I'm noticing that every comment of yours on this post shows up as greyed-out and 'dead' immediately after you post, within minutes. There's not enough time for people to downvote and in any case none of your comments are downvote-worthy. I've been 'vouching' for your comments so others can read them. Maybe something @dang can look into?

I'm new to HN(3 months, low karma). Maybe that's the reason? Not sure what would be the correct way to "fix" this

Thanks for vouching!

email the mods through the contact link in the footer. Probably some spam filter gone haywire.

I’m from India, thanks for doing this.

Great work man! Installed the app and ran the tests. If there is any way we can see the results do share.

From what I can see, there is no way to bypass the SNI filters without using a proxy/VPN of some sort. Do let me know you have any tips for it.

Thanks for running it! We are in the data collection stage at this moment, will definitely be publishing our findings and releasing the data publicly.

P.S. Our previous paper talks about censorship in India, albeit the data is from just one vantage point https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08590

As for circumvention, TLS 1.3 + ESNI + DoH should do the trick. Firefox has the capability to enable these options

I have enabled ESNI + DoH but most websites do not seem to support ESNI yet. VPN looks like the only option until then.

> In the absence of a publicly available official list of blocked hostnames

This is the icing on the cake right here. It's just awful that not only do websites get censored largely arbitrarily, there is no insight into the process and what is even blocked–the fact that someone had to literally check sites to see if they are being blocked (via a variety of different methods largely indistinguishable from a malicious actor :/) is just a truly horrible state to be in.

Yes, it’s frustrating to see the lack of transparency and the sheer futility in some cases to find who issued an order for what purpose in which jurisdiction affecting which ISPs.

DuckDuckGo was blocked a couple of o this ago. The nebulous words “national security”, without any context, are used as the justification for blocking many sites.

At least Indian authorities seem to be relatively open about the censorship. Here in Kazakhstan they simply block everything they want, taking down many "innocent" sites as collateral damage, and write it off as "temporary networking problems" and "works for me, what are you talking about?".

For the past week I've had numerous problems connecting to TLS directly, without using a VPN. I still update my system directly from a mirror to avoid wasting limited data on a remote VM, that's how I discovered it personally. I worry they're trying to implement something nefarious behind the scenes, again.

And here's the latest in SNI and ESNI censorship bypass: https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/posts/china-censors-esni/esni/

https://getintra.org/ which is a DoH client for Android bypasses Indian censorship, btw. Ref: https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

Fascinating, thank you for sharing. I'm impressed they were able to find so many ways to essentially confuse the GFW as to the current state of the connection. Looks like any company which wants to do business in China will just avoid implementing ESNI for the foreseeable future.

Apparently the 1.1.1.1 DoH app bypasses censoring in India too, from what I've read elsewhere on HN.

I wouldn't be surprised if 1.1.1.1 for Android was a Intra fork.

The Indian government has a long and varied track record of messing with the Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

Wow. From that page

> India leads the world, in the list of Internet Shutdowns. In 2018, as reported by Access Now, out of 196 documented Internet Shutdowns globally, India accounted for 134 of them.[124] The reasons for the shutdowns range from protests and political unrest to elections and exams.

As an ISP or telecom, when large groups of men with guns and uniforms come to your offices and order you to turn off all the routers, you don't have much choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Jammu_and_Ka...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-int...

India has severely restricted internet access in majority-Muslim Jammu and Kashmir for over a year. https://www.medianama.com/2020/09/223-2g-continues-jammu-kas...

Does anyone have insight into why College Humor (referenced in the article) is blocked in India? This seems unusual and I wonder what (if any) reasons were provided.

Probably some toilet humour that the censors didn't like.

You have to understand that reasons aren’t provided for blocking, because the blocking orders may come from different authorities and may not be disclosed due to “national security” reasons. All that we can glean from a site being blocked is that someone influential (not necessarily from an arm of the government) got offended by the site and used some means to get it blocked.

One can construct a list of hundreds of URLs and get a blocking order, with a few innocent ones slipped in between. Nobody will investigate the claims, and nobody can contest the claims before it’s ordered, but the order for blocking will be issued.

Another peculiar one being blocked (at least on Airtel) is Newgrounds. Not really sure what was going on when they decided to ban it.

Newgrounds is full of porn. It's probably blocked for the same reason pornhub is.

> In July 2015 the Supreme Court of India refused to allow the blocking of pornographic websites and said that watching pornography indoors in the privacy of one's own home was not a crime.[13] In August 2015 the Government of India issued an order to Indian ISPs to block at least 857 websites that it considered to be pornographic.[14] In 2015 the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had asked internet service providers to take down 857 websites in a bid to control cyber crime, but after receiving criticism from the authorities it partially rescinded the ban. The ban from the government came after a lawyer filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that online pornography encourages sex crimes and rapes.[15]

> In February 2016 the Supreme Court asked the Indian Government to suggest ways of banning all forms of child pornography.[16]

> In October 2018 the government directed Internet service providers to block 827 websites that host pornographic content following an order by the Uttarakhand High Court. The court cited the rape of a 10th standard girl from Dehradun by four of her seniors. The four accused told police that they raped the girl after watching pornography on the Internet.[17]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_India#Legalit...

This is a great, detailed report. I use one of these providers and see somewhat similar results (I do not use my ISPs DNS, but another one with DoH).

Am I right in concluding that these blocking methodologies can be thwarted to a greater extent by the user using Tor (or a VPN outside the country) and/or the websites in question using ESNI (and the user also using a non-ISP DoH provider that doesn’t have legal presence in the country, since the DNS providers will be the next target for these ill defined blocking orders)?

You don't really need tor or any other VPN for that matter, https://getintra.org/ a DoH client for Android works just fine [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/vinifortuna/status/1304189371688660992

As stated in my comment, I am using a DoH provider outside the country, but see similar blocking results as the article. Handling DNS alone isn’t going to work all the time, which is what the article detailed out.

Did you try https://getintra.org/ (hint: it isnt your typical DoH client)? You're in for a surprise.

Source: Work extensively on an Intra fork.

I read through https://support.getintra.org/s/article/How-Intra-works and it sounds exactly like any other DoH client with a denylist.

They leave out details: Read the tweet thread I linked to.

Intra also sets up a VPN connection, right?

Yes, but not in the traditional sense, like, say ProtonVPN.com or Psiphon.ca or Latern.io do.

Intra merely captures DNS traffic on port 53 and tunnels it to any DoH endpoint. It circumvents SNI censorship because it essentially sees all TCP and UDP traffic and can manipulate it on-device, and it does so in a way that bypasses most (but not all) censorship implementations.

So it's not VPN but uses Android's VPN API.

DoH client won’t stop SNI blocking, of which this report found a lot.

ESNI, of the new trick of using ESNI plus a fake plaintext SNI, is definitely a more robust approach.

A DoH client cannot prevent SNI blocking (I never claimed otherwise) but Intra does employ other client-side tricks to do so. God, did anyone read the referenced tweet? The down-votes are icing on the cake. And this is supposedly "hacker news". Sigh.

I think that censorship in India is a losing end, and it does not help anyone, not the government, not the ISPs, not the media lobbies.

They should just expose more endpoints, like the way TPB got over the problem, and keep these ISPs at bay. This is just my opinion.

Using firefox 81 on Jio broadband, one of the ISPs mentioned, and I was able to access www.womenonweb.org, one of the websites they mention was blocked. Maybe that's because of firefox's DoH?

Yes. Firefox DoH, or using 1.1.1.1 is generally enough to bypass most blocks in India

I run a tech company that got randomly blocked in India. There's no way it wasn't some kind of mistake. It's been months and there's no way to find out why and there's no documented method to resolve the problem.

While looking into this, it turns out it happens all the time and many websites have been blocked for years. If you're big enough then maybe you can get unblocked. Or you might just be SOL.

Some examples:

https://www.alexa.com/ has been blocked for over 1 year (https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/b084so/why_alexacom_...) (wtf?)

Trinet.com, an HR tech+services company is blocked in India (wtf?)

Adobe-owned behance.net is blocked in India. (why?)

reddit.com or parts of it are frequently blocked/unblocked https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/03/14/isps-are-reportedly-b...

9gag and collegehumor have been blocked for over 5 years (https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/comedy-websites-colleghumor...). At least there's some reason here.

Three environmentalist websites were blocked (and eventually unblocked): https://scroll.in/latest/967589/centre-run-agency-blocks-web...

The NYTimes was blocked for a while: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/new-york-times-access...

In 2014, India blocked Github for a while: https://qz.com/india/319866/a-threat-from-isis-prompts-india...

India is known for filtering websites belonging to NGOs, feminist groups, and others https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-tops-list-of-w...

As far as I can tell, if there's some random bureaucrat that doesn't like you, your website is going to get blocked. Equally likely, the process is so poor that you might get blocked for no reason at all.

Which ISP are you using? Because alexa.com, trinet.com, behance.net, NYTimes are working for me.

I'm not in India, but as far as I know, at least alexa.com and behance.net were blocked for long periods of time. I think NYTimes got unblocked fairly quickly.

Somewhat recent report of Alexa.com being blocked (July 2020): https://twitter.com/anandakrsn/status/1284763939427905536?s=...

Report of Behance being blocked on Aug, 2020: https://twitter.com/prabhjotjolly/status/1295623006358650880...

As the article explains, the blocking is very inconsistent.

The article also links to a github repo with some of the blocked hostnames they recently detected: https://github.com/kush789/How-India-Censors-The-Web-Data/bl...

You can see that the list includes alexa.com and behance. It also includes lots of others like craigslist.co.in, ABC.net.au, bleacherreport.com. From personal experience, I know that these are just a tiny subset of legitimate websites that have been blocked (and perhaps later unblocked) for seemingly no reason and have no clear recourse.

behance was definitely blocked for the longest time. I had Jio and Airtel both and I had tried them. Things have changed now because of the uproar.

Alexa, Behance and Trinet are accessible to me on Jio's network. Do you have a better source for this? r/India is not a reliable source.

r/India has extremely cynical view of current administration. I was a leftist, That sub-reddit is extreme left.

All three are accessible to me from ACT broadband in tier-3 city. Also work from a VPN on AWS bombay.

The blocks varies a lot. Broadband from the same companies will not block many sites that are blocked on their mobile networks. It depends on location as well as few other less controlled factors.

Source: I have broadband connection and sim from the same telecom and have noticed same issues in distant family houses.

It isn’t clear from the article, but how do we circumvent this? Would a VPN work?

Judging from the details, a Proxy/VPN to another nation should work.

Noob question : How is that effective if "SNI travels on the network in cleartext"

SNI is part of the HTTPS request, which would travel through the encrypted VPN channel. All network traffic would travel through your VPN, which is encrypted. The other end of the VPN channel is in another country which doesn’t block the website.

Your computer <—-encrypted channel to VPN in other country—-> https communication to blocked website

What a country could do but we haven’t seen before, is block all VPN protocol traffic, effectively banning VPNs. This would be disruptive to business or politicians using VPN for privacy, so it’s not as politically feasible.

That's cleartext within your TCP/IP connection. If you use a VPN, that connection itself is encrypted.

You can use https://getintra.org/ and its numerous forks to overcome censorship as implemented by Indian ISPs today.

Then there is Tor on Android https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/ and VPN services like https://getlantern.com/ and https://psiphon.ca/ that exclusively focus on anti-censorship measures. Check their privacy policies before committing to use them.

Shadowsocks has reliably worked for a long time in China, a country with arguably the best DPI capabilities on Earth.

Tor's pluggable transports also have been at this stuff for a long time.

The internet is for everyone.

Just use tor browser. Its fast enough to be usable now.

TLS1.3 + ESNI is a robust solution, Firefox has the option of enabling it.

Cloudflare has a great page which allows to check this https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/ssl/encrypted-sni/

A couple of problems:

1. ESNI isn't a standard yet. So, support in mainstream web-clients is lacking.

2. Unfortunately, TLS v1.3 is blocked in countries with stringent censorship already.

Wait what?? TLS 1.3 is blocked by some countries? As more and more of the Web, especially CDNs move to TLS 1.3, won't these countries be effectively crippling the Net for their citizens?

Also ESNI needs server support I believe and very few servers support it. Right now it is effective only for sites fronted by Cloudflare if I'm not mistaken, and while that isn't a small number still its by no means the wider Net.

China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 and ESNI

https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encr...

I would not be surprised if some countries started blocking all the known DoH resolvers as well.

Will TLS 1.3 and ESNI support circumvent this?

I'm wondering this too. The article claims some of the connection are proxied. However if it's a big site that uses a set range if incoming IPs, I feel like blocking could still happen at the TCP level (and maybe catch a bunch of other unrelated sites if it's on a shared hosting solution).

Have used ESNI to successfully circumvent this in the past.

In most cases: no. ESNI is still a draft and most sites are identifiable by IP only.

Pretty much yes, unless ISPs start blocking IPs as well. We haven't seen this in India (at least yet)

That also gets tricky for them, when say IPs are from Cloudflare, AWS or other cloud-scalers and CDNs.

Nations will struggle to block the IP ranges for big players like that without blocking a lot of stuff they don’t intend to.

For anyone in India, just use a DoH client and you would be good to go.

I use greentunnel and it works fine.

Is something like greentunnel necessary. I'm in India and I've found that Firefox with its builtin DoH connection to Cloudflare seems to bypass all govt blocks I've personally come across. Haven't tested specifically for this though... just normal browsing experience.

Try using your setup to access a blocked website on a Jio connection. You'll find why greentunnel is required :)

Greentunnel is not just a DoH client. Greentunnel also breaks up your packets in such a manner that prevents SNI sniffing, which is what makes it able to prevent blocking by Jio.

> Greentunnel also breaks up your packets in such a manner that prevents SNI sniffing...

Yep, here's the code that does the trick: https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel/blob/master/src/...

Hmmm... No thanks.

    "dependencies": {
      "app-data-folder": "^1.0.0",
      "chalk": "^2.4.2",
      "clear": "^0.1.0",
      "consola": "^2.11.0",
      "debug": "^4.1.1",
      "dns-over-http": "^0.1.2",
      "dns-over-tls": "0.0.6",
      "esm": "^3.2.22",
      "is-docker": "^2.0.0",
      "lru-cache": "^5.1.1",
      "node-localstorage": "^2.1.5",
      "ora": "^3.2.0",
      "std-env": "^2.2.1",
      "universal-analytics": "^0.4.20",
      "update-notifier": "^2.5.0",
      "validator": "^10.11.0",
      "winreg": "^1.2.4",
      "yargs": "^13.2.2"
    },

DoH just by itself won't help unfortunately, since it just fetches the DNS (btw, only Airtel, ACT, BSNL, and MTNL bother with DNS censorship).

ISPs have been looking at the cleartext hostname in the TLS handshake to block these connections

As someone correctly pointed out, greentunnel does much more than DoH.

Thanks to everyone in this subthread. I'm on BSNL which I find is one of the Indian ISPs that seems to implement easy to circumvent blocks (DNS based), so far. Reliance no doubt is a different beast with its financial and technical clout and increasing market share. Rather concerning that we're quickly catching up to China in terms of implementing an increasingly sophisticated firewall.

Seriously can't expect the average Joe to know about stuff like greentunnel. And that's concerning...

Isnt' SNI based on the 'Host' header?! This is a news for me that SNI is not encrypted in TLS. Its a problem with the protocol not the ISPs then.

Encrypted SNI has been in talks for a long time now. It was meant to be out now but it was shot down at the last minute. And yes, its the last thing that allows a MitM to work out which site you are on if its hosted on a shared hosting platform. Likely this is the reason its hard to get approved.

To determine which certificate to use the web server needs the client to send it the domain.

To send the domain securely the client needs to know the public key of the certificate the server is using.

This chicken and egg problem has gone unresolved for a long time, and only now are there efforts to fix it (see the work on esni).

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer...

India is literally the largest democratic country by population in the world. Despite its issues, it has a functioning democracy, yet its freedom of speech is limited.

I've lived in a few different countries, and one thing that still amazes me is that America still has some of the strongest court prescient when it comes to speech laws. We have restrictions of course, like all countries do, but I've never seen the US ranked high on the free speech indexes I've seen. My own research leads me to believe the US and Japan stand out as the two nations with some of the strongest free speech laws (although Japan's have some challenging issues with copyright and fair use).

What good is all of this semblance of free speech when the communication and print platforms of our age that enable the transmission of vast portions of our speech essentially dictate what they will carry and what they wont.

Unless you publish a physical book of course and then promote it and distribute it yourself or on a much smaller scale, you post pamphlets on utility poles or other such low tech-low reach media, a FB or a Twitter or a Tik Tok can take down even your "missing pet" posts, because your pet breed offends some people in some manner. They reserve the right to do so. Of course you wont find them doing that, but the fact that they have to power to do so, in itself should be disconcerting.

I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) but America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically.

  America still has some of the strongest court 
  prescient when it comes to speech laws

Also, I don't know what that means.

>I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically.

I'm in America, and I can access plenty of racist, sexist, government propaganda, anti government propaganda, anti religion, pro religion, anti police, pro police, violence, pornography, and so much more with the click of a button. If I wanted to, I can also upload any of these thoughts myself to someone else's computer (or use my own computer) and then post links to it to any number of online forums or chat groups where people would have access to them just by clicking on a link.

Whether a tech-savvy person can run boolean searches on 5 different search engines ( that may not even be English-first engines ) and then find a "Daily Stormer" or two is not the point here - youre either missing the point entirely or deliberately gaslighting here.

The point is that the content is hard to reach and nearly inaccessible to wide swaths of the population if the forces that be, deem that content troubling, to the people in their walled gardens and the ideological bubbles, they operate in.

This way, you can effectively screen and curate what views and slants reach the masses and manufacture consensus around an issue easily. You and me and the tech-inclined can find easy workarounds but that is besides the point.

Thats a huge problem.

That’s just Noise, not communication. Try making a reasoned and articulated argument for something controversial (and in a polarized society like the US one, mostly anything is) and see how long it takes for takedowns and shadowbans to reduce your reach down to nothing.

https://rsf.org/en/ranking It seems you are not that right.

And it seems anyone who has traveled outside of their home country recognizes this list as the bullshit that it is. Please stop linking it.

Any source for that, looks pretty good to me? Been to 30 or so different countries but not entirely sure why traveling abroad is relevant.

You probably won't get a reply. At least a rational one. I experienced similar sentiment here on HN when discussion the topic of freedom a while back.

Reporters without borders is probably one of the best sources to evaluate the quality of Freedom of Press worldwide.

But for some people arguing that not all is great with their freedom in the US challenges a part of their identity. And that makes rational discussion at least difficult.

As an example: Growing up near the Iron Curtain (on the western side) I believed for a long time, that we were the universally free side, while there was no freedom in the east.

During the last 10 years or so I realized that there were freedoms on the other side I didn't know of. And have never had in this so called free society.

I came to realize that there are different freedoms and that every society has different limits to these freedoms. Sometimes even within one country there are different limits to the same freedom for different social groups. Take Germany for example. The freedom to receive a good to great education depends massively on the affluency of one's family. There is nearly no chance of social movement for the poor. Or take the freedom to tell your boss what a bad idea it is to increase dividends for shareholders by 10% while letting people go (with the official reason being told is, that the company is struggling) and telling the rest, that there is no mt enough earnings to warrant a raise. I know people who were fired because of this.

Or take the outcry at Google when someone at Google published an internal mail with right wing leaning (if I remember correctly).

I am very much left leaning, but I would not challenge some parts of the ideological agendas being pushed at my workplace because I fear being ostracized.

So to make a long argument short I think freedom isn't an absolute. And the ideology behind it is often part of someone's identity. That makes rational discussion difficult.

> As an example: Growing up near the Iron Curtain (on the western side) I believed for a long time, that we were the universally free side, while there was no freedom in the east.

> During the last 10 years or so I realized that there were freedoms on the other side I didn't know of. And have never had in this so called free society.

Mind sharing some examples?

I think he mentioned indirectly the freedom to have a good education independently on one's parents wealth.

For example there were many instances, were people were telling their boss what an idiot he/she was and I know of many cases were it even came to push, punch and shove. They did not loose their jobs for speaking their mind freely. On the other hand - while the west was allowed to tell their government what idiots they were, they boss was spared, because he/she could fire you (more or less) at will.

Also the freedom of social upwards movement was way greater in eastern Germany than in western Germany. Also the freedom of a better educational system (propaganda was massive in both systems none the less).

You appear to be comparing the 2 kinds of liberty Isiah Berlin outlined[1], that of negative and positive liberty. English (and hence) American conceptions of liberty historically tend strongly to negative liberty, European countries like Germany emphasise positive liberty more - though as you point out there's a mix everywhere and to differing degrees.

One of my favourite interviews is with Berlin[2] where he talks about why positive liberty is so dangerous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfhQhdA-zss Tom Richey with an intro [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIP9IjJcZr4 Isiah Berlin interview on the ABC on freedom

The problem with 'positive' liberty is simple. You can't have it without taking negative liberty away first- i.e. Universal Healthcare as a 'right'- you have to compel multiple levels of society via coercion in order to fulfill that right, thus weakening their negative rights to be free from such coercion.

For some reason, many people seem cling to a nebulous idea of 'government,' that is more a wish fulfillment mechanism than concrete enforcer entity, can provide positive rights without impinging on the more basic negative rights.

> Or take the outcry at Google when someone at Google published an internal mail with right wing leaning (if I remember correctly).

The only thing that comes to mind for me here is the Damore memo, except 1) he didn't publish it, and 2) it was very left-leaning. It was about how to actually achieve the company's diversity goals, there were just some parts of it based on actual research that went against accepted narratives.

Was there some other leaked email I'd not seen?

So, I'm not arguing "USA #1". Never would, and to be honest, I haven't been to every country to compare. But their reasoning for ranking it low is 'Trump cracking down' blah blah. Go to CNN's website right now, their top headline is literally calling him a sham. The press here is free to do this, naturally, despite alarmist theories.

Some of the countries ranked higher(in rank = lower number) are not even so safe to be in. How can you consider liberty among a place people can't even freely go where they want to report?

I'd say that as someone who actually has traveled outside their country, this list seems pretty fair to me ( at least for the countries I have traveled to or have friends/family staying in). what is your exact bone of contention? Methodology or specific country's ranking?

In that ranking India is only 0.01 points ahead of pakistan. Does not pass my smell test about its methodology to be honest.

As an Indian, knowing the journalistic persecution and state of free speech in India, I wouldn't be surprised if India is tied up with Pakistan.

Here is some stuff to read up on this http://www.rightsrisks.org/banner/india-medias-crackdown-dur...

http://attacksonrtiusers.org/

This is totally wrong. We have free speech but the major problem is that poor and educated aren't ready for this level of openness in our society.

And this statement here (one I’ve heard before from others as well) demonstrates one of our biggest problems (speaking as someone who grew up in India) - and makes my blood boil.

Without respect for the individual and individual rights, Indian society will not progress. Sitting on your high horse and making judgements about how the poor and uneducated (or any other group) aren’t ready for free speech is not the way.

Here's something fresh for today; Amnesty India quits India operations due to govt' reprisals. https://amnesty.org.in/news-update/amnesty-international-ind...

Reality, I fear is fairly dystopic and I can keep posting such news articles all day which show India's slide into Authoritarianism.

Sri Lanka ranking well ahead of India is an even bigger red flag.

Journalists and editors have been openly killed in Sri Lanka for opinion pieces that dared to tarnish the government.

Agreed but it is ranked 127 so it’s towards the bottom as it should be.

The difference is actually 0.19 points. You can read their description of press freedom in India https://rsf.org/en/india or of Pakistan https://rsf.org/en/pakistan and neither sounds that great.

I constantly see Norway/Denmark/Sweden/Switzerland at the top of good lists, like this rsf one. Never been there, but a bit jealous (and happy for those living there) that other countries that have insanely more resources at their disposal are unable to copy these tiny countries.

Ar a private citizen do you believe that you're going to be unmolested by the US govt over your speech (and let's say there are a 100 statements test which include all kinds of speech) vs Norwegian govt?

Their methodology seems strongly politically motivated, because they rank Germany very highly despite the repression of speech related to Turkey by journalists in Germany. Germany literally made certain types of speech illegal for geopolitical reasons because of their ties to Turkey.

Perhaps these rankings would have been believable 5 years ago, but today, they are not. The United States is also rated much too low here, which also stinks of political motivation. While we do have a President that can't seem to help but open his mouth to release stupidity and toxicity, the US has the strongest legal protections of speech and press in the world, and the only government action against journalists that might shift this belief is the ongoing case with Julian Assange, too recent to have been reflected in these rankings.

There is, to my knowledge, only one country which has Constitutionally protected free speech and it's the United States. There are censorship laws on the books in most other countries, either in fact, or in actuality. Germany for instance censors many types of speech. You may have some argument that this is a good thing, but nonetheless it shouldn't rank higher on any unbiased free speech index than the US, and yet here is one in which it is more than 30 positions higher ranked.

> I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America.

I don't get that statement. For example, there are a lot of banned TV series in "America" (I assume USA?), too. Not even going to mention all that other censorship there ... I didn't read your article yet, though. Just in case you clarify on that statement there.

What series have been banned in the us? I can watch anything I want here.

The USA has more freedom of speech that many countries, but its heavily biased on certain ways. To show violence on TV is Ok, but to show a naked body makes people go all full censorship.

That a nip slip in 2004 generated news around all the country and intensified fines on "indecency" is just plain ridiculous. That level of censorship is very difficult to justify when other countries are much more comfortable showing nudity.

So, the USA is not in a bad place when come to censorship. But, it has a long way to improve.

The TV part is a legacy of 1950s era laws for free-to-air broadcast radio and television.

You say the USA has a cultural aversion to nudity. But it also legally produces a vast quantity of legal pornography, and the web hosting companies for the world's largest online paid and advertising-supported pornography operations are all in the USA.

And provided that things like ID age checking, consent and record-keeping are all followed, nobody is kicking in their doors and arresting the operators.

There is no "full censorship" of nudity in the USA.

Be careful what you wish for... while I've always been a huge fan of the First Amendment, the consequences of completely unrestrained speech have never been clearer, with quite significant numbers of people believing that Bill Gates engineered Covid-19 to implant computer chips in your brain through vaccines, and other stuff which would be hilarious if it weren't so destructive.

I am glad they exercised those freedoms in the examples you mentioned. I did however miss the destruction they caused. And why wouldn't they poke fun at some dinosaur who desperately tries to remain relevant? I should start making more memes targetting billionaires, think of all the havoc!

The destruction, in this particular case, is that a lot of people aren't going to get a vaccine when it's released, which will kill a lot of people. More broadly, the fact that mis- and dis-information spreads more widely than real information today has led to a complete breakdown of a shared factual reality, which is a prerequisite for any kind of consensus-based or democratically based system of government. If we're trying to get to Chicago and half of us believe we're in San Francisco and the other half believe we're in Philadelphia, we're not going to make any progress beyond which of us is better at tug of war.

Free speech is not about releasing every movie or TV show produced by entitled people. It's about free speech of common people. A person getting fired for a thing he/she commented a decade ago is not free speech. USA has lot to do with free speech which really matters.

USA was top country regarding free speech in maybe 1980s but now, it needs to change it's policies to be one.

You’ve made a common mistake - constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech means freedom from the government restricting you from or persecuting you for speech.

That does not mean citizens need to tolerate whatever you say. For example, a commenter on HN might break the rules and get banned by dang. Dang isn’t violating their constitutional rights, because dang/HN isn’t the government. [1]

Similarly, trump the private citizen was free to block people on Twitter. Trump the President was directed by courts to unblock a person because their ability to participate in public discourse had been curtailed by a government official. [2] When Trump is no longer president, he will be free to block anyone once more.

I understand where you’re coming from - you felt that back in the day you were free to say whatever you liked without fear of repercussions from private citizens. I agree but this could be because of a couple of changes

- we store everything that’s said. A passing comment from 10 years ago isn’t stored, but a tweet is.

- society changes what is acceptable to say. There were restrictions at that time as well (the n word could get you fired) but now society also frowns upon a broader range of transgressions.

This is fine, society is entitled to change its mind. 25 years ago only 25% of Americans were supportive of gay rights. Today it’s 67%. [3] You can see how a homophobic slur would be acceptable at that time but not in 2020.

[1] - or are they?! X-Files theme plays

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-twitter/u-s-asks-su...

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...

The problem in the US is that you have labor laws that do not protect workers, so private citizens have all the free speech in the world, but they can't use it out of fear of being fired. And there's no free speech in the work place as the boss can fire you on the spot for whatever. Do you then have free speech when it does not extend to the work place where you spend 1/3 of your day?

I find it interesting how many seem so content with that constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech means freedom from the government restricting you.

At what point does that stop being useful, as corporations gain power over the government?

Some used to worry that private malls replacing public venues for people congregating caused an erosion of rights. Now the Internet is mostly private malls. Anyone can self host a blog, still, but most spend their virtual lives in the "online private malls".

It almost sounds like you're described freedom of speech as a right to be heard. That's a distinction of positive/negative freedoms as mentioned previously in this thread. You can host a blog and your speech won't be restricted (negative freedom), but if no one is viewing it, that's because no one cares to hear what you have to say. You don't have the right to be heard (positive freedom) because that would require people being forced to hear you.

If the problem is that you can't build an audience it's not because your freedom of speech is being restricted, it's because no one wants to listen to you.

Or it's because the town square is gone and you have the free speech corner somewhere off into the woods.

And one of the primary reasons why private speech is so heavily restricted by other private citizens because government cannot restrict you.

For the kinds of things people in America get fired, in European countries they get arrested for that.

Free speech is a culture phenomenon in the US that goes well beyond the US constitution.

This argument that only the direct legal limitations is enforced is very naive and a much more modern take because social media companies have largely ignored the cultural and ethical implications. Yet plenty of people, organizations, policies, and general common sense have embraced free speech voluntarily (ie, companies refusing to try to control their employees speech and views pushed outside of the workplace).

Ummm what? America bans films and TV series too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_Un...

SO in the last 20 years 2 movies have been very briefly banned because of relevant court cases and one wasn't allowed to be shown on tv within a month of an election(supreme court overturned that law). I wouldn't really say that equals America bans films and tv series.

IMO: with limited freedom of speech you can't really have a functioning democracy, just something that resembles one and is temporarily stable.

The exercise of freedom often depends on the context. During the latest Iraq invasion, when the death toll started to rise, US TV networks were forbidden from displaying coffins returning from the war zone, because it could have fueled anti-war feelings among the population. It may have been a lot less than jailing someone for merely saying something the government doesn't like, which is what happens in countries we define as non-free, but it's still acting against freedom of press that turns out into lying to the public.

collegehumor.com pornhub.com are not blocked in https://www.torproject.org/download/

I use https://www.torproject.org/download/ to access blocked urls;

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