Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

> It means government won't retaliate against you

No, that's the meaning of the first amendment. Free Speech is a principle of tolerance not limited to the government.

If society as a whole believes in Free speech, that society as a whole will be more tolerant, both in private and public spaces. Not absolutely tolerant, but more tolerant. The first amendment is the codification into law of this broad principle.

The other thing, which is not talked about nearly as much, are the forces opposed to free speech. You have, basically, a tug of war. On the one hand, society believes that "free speech" is a valuable principle. So it does things like having a generous moderation policy on hacker news and laws like the first amendment are passed. But then you have the opposing forces, the ones who say "free speech is nice, but issue X is so important we must punish people who speak against it". That has traditionally been things like advocating violence.

Now if the set of such issues fills up all of life, then you will lose free speech. So the real problem is not people exploiting free speech -- the paradox of tolerance is a purely intellectual exercise that almost never manifests in the real world. In the real world you have the principle of intolerance, that more and more aspects of ordinary life are put into the "this is violence" bucket and so used to restrict free speech, up until people claim that speech itself is violence. No society has ever come close enough to valuing free speech so much that the paradox of intolerance could possibly kick in.

I agree with you on the argument "paradox of tolerance" - it talks about an extreme situation that mostly does not happen, as a reason for general policy. This argument seems often misused as a reason to come down hard on any speech that is objectionable to some group.

More sane policy would be to adopt a default of free speech, be tolerant, and only then decide on exceptions on case by case basis, like about promoting Nazism in Europe. I don't think promoting Nazism should be protected the same way other free speech is, because of the concrete example of tragic consequences we have where it lead and the cost whole world had to pay.

Prostitution does not have victims. Forcing someone into prostitution has a victim - the unwilling prostitute. This is a crime committed by the trafficker against the prostitute, not a crime committed by the prostitute against the client (or even vice versa).

Again, take the example I gave of slavery. The analogous argument to yours is to claim that cotton picking is not victimless. Obviously there were victims in the antebellum south. But to say that cotton picking is the crime is to miss the point entirely and to hurt the victims of the actual crime. Cotton picking is victimless, unless you think cotton feels pain. Forcing someone to pick cotton is a crime.

STDs are not a crime*. They are a potential downside of sexual activity of all kinds. We are comfortable with all sorts of activities having potential injurious downsides which are not criminal. You can get a concussion playing football, but that doesn't mean giving someone a concussion in the course of playing football (as opposed to because you specifically set out to attack them, of course) is a crime, and it certainly doesn't mean that playing football itself ought to be criminalized. If someone claimed that the only way to stop football concussions was to criminalize the game, we would find that position laughable or at least dangerously authoritarian.

Robberies and killings are a crime, and they can be prosecuted in their own sake. Robberies and killings also happen in, say, banks; we don't say that this is a reason to make banking illegal.

In fact, it is because banking is legal that police and regulated armed guards can be at banks and stand by as legitimate, victimless banking transactions happen, and that a bank under attack can call for the police and know that they will not get shut down. Going back to the example of the fugitive slave - a slave who knows he's been forced into illegal actions is unlikely to seek his freedom and is quite likely to seek the effective protection of his master, preventing him from accessing the liberty due to him in a just society. Similarly, people participating in the victimless crimes of the sex or drug industry generally have little recourse to the justice system. Robberies and killings (and mistreatment of prostitutes) happens because criminals know that their victims do not have the same ability to pursue justice as the general public does. Fully legalizing these industries is the only plausible first step to solving this problem.

* I should probably say that they should not be a crime. Some jurisdictions have such laws, and they are widely recognized to be both unjust and ineffective, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_transmission_of_HIV_i...

In a network like Status or Session, you don’t need to know and don’t care who runs the node you happen to be using at a given moment.

Not to mention that you don’t actually own your accounts unless you run the server yourself.