Most people want to speak their minds freely, without fear that their bank account will be frozen, they will lose their job, or the STASI will show up at their door in the middle of the night to whisk them to a torture chamber.
Unfortunately, many people in the world can't speak freely without fear of such repercussions. Even in the US--which has historically had strong free speech protections--there is a growing clamor for censorship from both the right and the left.
For example, as I write this, KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) just passed by the Senate 91-3. KOSA will allow politicians and federal commissioners to decide what Americans can read and watch online.
Fortunately, pro-free speech, pro-privacy software developers have written a number of tools that help people maintain their sovereignty even in the face of government censorship.
I've compiled a list of such "sovereign software" here:
Note that this list is a work in progress. Some of the entries will have errors or be incomplete. Some of the projects aren't actively maintained; some are for techies only.
Very few of them meet all criteria for ideal sovereign software that I spell out below.
However all of them have one or more "sovereign" features.
In the future, I will highlight some of my favorite projects that I think are of general interest.
Here's the key to the non-obvious column labels:
Monero - part of Monero ecosystem
Private - emphasizes privacy / anonymity
No-JS - No Javascript
Command - command line program
Offline - works well even when offline
Plaintext - Data files are plaintext
< 1.44 MB Compiled app requires only 1.44 MB of memory (same amount of memory on old school floppy disk)
Read on, for more on the rationale for this list.
Recipe for Censorship: Trump Derangement Syndrome + Covid 19
At the peak of the Trump / Covid hysteria, many authoritarian policies were implemented across the US (and much of the rest of the world):
For nine months, Black Live Matter protesters (who were mostly white progressives) looted and burned cities across the US, causing more damage than any civil unrest since the Civil War.
Travel in/out of the US was heavily restricted both by the US government and by foreign governments.
A third of all businesses (especially small firms) were shutdown by government decree.
Social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, major tech firms (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, et), and most legacy TV/news firms (MSNBC, CBS, etc) colluded with government officials to censor / suppress anything that conflicted with the official government narrative.
President Trump's accounts were banned from most social media platforms.
Major tech firms tech firms (Amazon, Google, colluded to drive competing social media firms (Gab, Parler) from the internet.
The Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of donors to the trucker protests.
As it seemed that government censorship / persecution was going to become the new norm, I started researching how people could continue to communicate freely even in the face of government persecution / censorship.
Biden won the election, so the pressure to suppress "wrong-think" declined. Elon Musk bought Twitter and substantially relaxed the censorship protocols that had been in place. As a result, people with contrarian / heterodox views now had a global platform where they could broadcast in relative peace.
2024 Elections: Another Course of Censorship
However, the political heat is rising once again.
Biden has dementia and has dropped out of the presidential race. His anointed replacement, Kamala Harris, is a weak candidate who will face a difficult time against Trump. As a result, Harris allies in the media and tech world are going to do everything they can to prop her up and suppress Trump.
The national debt is increasing by $1 trillion every nine months. The only politically practical way to pay for the debt is to print more dollars, which increases the inflation rate. As their dollars buy less and less, the population is going to become increasingly angry.
Both parties are now dominated by authoritarian populists who have no problem with imposing censorship on their rivals. Both parties are cultivating envy and resentment which often leads to public support for authoritarian policies.
There has already been one assassination attempt against Trump. If Trump wins, I expect he will seek revenge on those he perceives as responsible for the attack.
AI software will enable much greater centralized tracking / surveillance. For example, Putin's regime has used AI powered facial recognition software to identify protesters.
As a result, I think it's time once again to revisit software that helps people to communicate / collaborate even in the face of widespread government censorship.
Ideally, sovereign software has the following traits:
Low Cost
Censorship-Resistant
Secure
User-friendly
Financially Self-Sustaining
Low Cost
Since many of the people living under the most authoritarian regimes are desperately poor, the ideal software would be low cost across all of the following dimensions:
bandwidth
power
memory
CPU
data storage
cost
sysadmin overhead
The ideal software will run gracefully on low end cell phone or a solar powered Raspberry PI (512 MB ram, 1 G storage) over a 56 K dial up connection.
Censorship Resistant
In order to be censorship resistant, the ideal software is:
open source (BSD/MIT license preferred)
private by default (no one except your intended recipients should be able to see your messages
anonymous by default (no one knows who you are, unless you choose to reveal yourself)
peer to peer (P2P networks are much harder to shut down than centralized servers)
encrypted in transit (messages are encrypted while traveling to your recipient)
encrypted at rest (all your data on your home machine / servers is encrypted)
no metadata (no one knows who you talk to, when you to talk to them, or the physical location of either party)
available as a progressive web app (PWA) (PWA's run in the browser, thereby avoiding app store censorship)
offline-first (the software operate well even when the internet is unavailable see Berty, RemoteStorage)
Secure
As most of the people running the software will not be tech savvy, most of the burden of security will depend on the developers. Ideally, the software will defend against bad actors among a) users b) developers c) corporations d) governments e) non-state actors (thieves, terrorists, hackers). Such software will have the following features:
follows Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well)
developers offer a bug bounty
integrated into native package management systems (apt, AppImage, homebrew, etc)
uses native UI widgets
future proof (follows open data standards)
copyright-free
patent-free
reproducible builds (Bitcoin Core, Tor browser)
runs on open hardware
Javascript-free
easily repairable / upgrade-able
User Friendly
Non-technical people are easily confused, impatient, and unwilling to read the documentation. Therefore, the ideal software should be as simple to use as possible:
command line first, but with an attractive GUI (see TubeArchivist)
anonymous by default (see Monero)
private by default (Simplex)
well-documented (see OpenBSD documentation)
well-tested (see SQLite)
self-contained (see AppImage)
easily installed / de-installed (see NixOS)
Financially Self-Sustaining
Finally, if the developers don't have the means of financially supporting themselves, it's likely the developer(s) will quit and the software will eventually succumb to bitrot. Developers of controversial software (such as Tornado Cash / Samourai Wallet, Silk Road) also need substantial funds to mount effective legal defenses.
Here are some methods that some open source projects use to financially support themselves:
corporate sponsorship (Linux)
open source + paid services (StandardNotes, Wordpress)
sponsorware (Livewire)
donations (Signal)
tokens (Nym, Arweave)
advertising (Brave, BootstrapCDN)
grants (Tornado Cash, vexl, Mastodon, Peertube)
commercial support contracts (IBM)
Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome. If you'd like to help maintain this list, please let me know and I'll give you editing access.
sovereign software keywords
#0data
#a11y
#accessible
#commandline
#jamstack
#nojs
#permaweb
#offline-first
#plaintext
#slimapp
#smallweb
#brutalwebb
#spartanweb
#brutalweb
#remotestorage
#fediverse
#p2p
#zeroknowledge
#fediverse
#nostr