With Tor it is so easy to go around these things that you install a program and push a button to have your trafic bypass any and all national filters, if only more people dared to put up servers so Tor wasn't so extremely slow.
- Edward's law
The problem, I think, is precisely the one you highlight:
> If only more people dared to put up servers
"Society" can make it so that it's "dangerous" (for given values) and, more importantly, uninteresting (for the masses) to use the new tech, and thus it remains a non-solved problem, which could herald a bleaker future.
http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2008/06/fascist_bias_in_censo...
The problem with them is that they work a little too well. I'm probably in the 99th percentile (globally) in what I will defend as "free speech" and even I can't stomach the idea of running a Freenet node, between the content I'm not willing to defend as free speech, and the content that I may be willing to defend as free speech but have no desire to subsidize monetarily. It's going to be challenging getting much critical mass out of a system that can carry wikileaks-type info.