Create an anonymous speech platform with a mutually trusted central authority. The authority needs to not keep logs.
Because there will be a lot of inane speech, tagging will be critically desirable. I suspect there are some broad categories of speech that will flow on anonymous platform. Self-tagging may even be useful.
Pornography. Copyright violations. Harassment towards individuals. Hate speech toward a group. Coordination and discussion toward criminal activity. Whistleblowing. Leaking confidential information. Politically incorrect personal beliefs. Socially taboo topics. Other. There is overlap.
"Other" might demonstrate the infinite upside potential of the freedom of speech, though the other categories could, too.
The proposed initial deployment is at a university, where there hopefully already exists significant traction for the importance of free expression of ideas, so may have faculty or administration willing to serve as the trusted central authority.
What are the legal issues? If a prosecutor asks for logs, there are none. If a prosecutor asks to start keeping logs, the service is shut down. Can a prosecutor ask to start keeping logs surreptitiously and force the service to keep running?
In any case, the exercise will be enlightening.
Let the UI provide tools to maintain anonymity, e.g., obscure the "write-print". Capitalization, spacing after periods, line width, smart quotation marks. Time delay in sending. Perhaps a short message length is desirable like Twitter?
It'll be tricky as upset users will try to trick each other into revealing identity.
In the real world, can a central authority build such trust? Money held in escrow which the authority earns interest until the trust is broken, at which point the escrow donates the money to the government.
Building a such a platform without a central authority is much harder, though many are trying. Do the easier case, first.
How can something like this be tested before actual deployment?
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