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But it's a cost/benefit problem, no? People say this bearing in mind free speech. Sure, free speech makes it ok to say lots of terrible things, but the boon to human rights outweighs by far the evil made possible. People assume that this logic extends to technologies that facilitate free speech. Care to argue that it does not?

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I'm thinking more of engineers who happily work on scramjets and ignore that extra mass budget and those empty payload bays that aren't for cameras.

Someone on here recommended an inspiring TED talk by the head? of Darpa. Rather than finding it inspiring, I found her naiveté or willful ignorance chilling. Somewhat off-topic.

Many countries have decided that removing free speech rights from, e.g., child pornography is worth it. Why would that logic not extend to the technologies you mention also?

Because part of the purpose of these networks is to subvert government control. If you can censor one thing (e.g. child porn), then you can censor anything, which makes it useless if you're an anti-government radical in China, for example.

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