[Cryptography] Signal hypothetical use case becomes practical since cellular providers have started censoring private text messages

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 03:47:11PM -0800, Whitfield Diffie wrote:
> 
>     I am shocked to learn that they are allowed to censor anything.  This
> is a personal message, not a broadcast.  Are they allowed to censor email?
> Telephone conversation?

Censoring (blocking) spam calls is not only allowed, it's very much
**welcome**.

Even after STIR/SHAKEN was deployed, I was still getting some SPAM
calls through, and I called up Google Fi customer support to complain
that their censorship of spam calls was not complete, and asked if I
could have a personal censorship list to block all calls with a
claimed source number of 1-888 --- because I was getting multiple
unwanted phone calls per hour, with different 1-888 suffixes, so I
couldn't block individual source number, but instead wanted to block
all 1-888-* numbers.  This kind of censorship is something that is
devoutedly to be desired, and if that means throttling the free speach
"rights" of Nigerian Princes or people offering car warantee
extensions, I would strongly argue they have no right to infest my
inbox or my voice mail.

      	 				- Ted