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How do you build a censorship-resistant site? Part 2

(Part 1)

When the information you publish starts causing serious damage, there will be pressure on your domain provider to delist your domain and on your hosting provider to take down your content. Things start getting quite inconvenient, and you start making tradeoffs. You can move your domain and hosting to providers in countries that are not on the best of terms with the countries that want your content to be removed. Wikileaks has hosted itself on a Russian provider in the past. If you’re a Westerner, this may make for uncomfortable bedfellows.

You can potentially fragment your content, especially if it’s text, and distribute it across notes on pastebin. Then there’s no one target. The problem again is discovery. If you have just a single piece or a small set of documents that could work. But if you want to run a publication, that will be a problem. You could run a channel on, say, Telegram to distribute your posts/episodes. With sufficient outrage, though, Telegram may shut your public channel down. But the lines appear to be if the stuff you’re publishing is child pornography, organising terrorism or fomenting an armed uprising

At this point, your only path is to get off the web altogether.

And get on the Tor network, aka the Dark Web. This will likely involve hosting your own web server, off a home computer or a Raspberry Pi. You’ll get an Onion network address, bypass the DNS infrastructure altogether. This means that your site is more or less untouchable (though not 100%) but significantly – massively, in fact – less accessible. It’s only reachable through the Tor web browser. And the distribution probem still remains – because you’re no longer on the regular web, you don’t have a regular domain name. You do have an address – that ends in .onion – but people still need to know it. For broad-based distribution of whatever it is you’re still publishing, you’re going to rely mostly on your visitors on Tor pasting and sharing it via mainstream-web chat and email. 

This is where you’ve ended up. Good luck.

(ends)