As a citizen of a country that is somewhat oppressed by our government, I think there is a lot that can be done by our tech community to democratize such techno

As a citizen of a country that is somewhat oppressed by our government, I think there is a lot that can be done by our tech community to democratize such technologies and put surveillance powers in the hands of people. In the country I live in, federal and local governments are peopled by employees most of whom tend to be some combination of such "fine" words as venal, corrupt, rent-seeking, dishonest, scammy, sadistic, rude and the like. There's probably more crimes and unethical activities being done by government employees than any other group. I think adverse effects on our society from them is much higher than people we normally term as criminals. In that sense, I think of our governments as actively adversarial and hostile to our society. I don't have any direct experience living in other countries, but from what I read about other countries in media, blogs and discussion forums, governments that behave in adversarial hostile manner towards their own societies seem to be the norm in underdeveloped and developing countries around the world. As an article I read recently pointed out, such governments have rules and laws to make their societies obey them and their needs, but rarely legislate laws that can balance the asymmetry of power, such as whistleblower laws, citizen information acts or independence in criminal investigations. That's why I think there is a lot that can be done by our tech community to democratize such technologies and put surveillance powers in the hands of people. If the residents of a locality decide to track their local government employees to collect proof of unethical activities using a peer-to-peer mesh of their private cameras (for example, uncovering unethical financial activities such as misuse of taxes on unnecessary contract works), I think we should provide such software systems that are easily available for - and usable by - everybody. The fear of adversarial surveillance can work in both directions. The same fear that governments use to curb dissidents or critics can also help curb or deter government's unethical activities when people are empowered to create that fear. Even the most rudimentary information about technologies and procedures that can empower oppressed people is severely lacking. For example, citizens writing and exposing government abuse is probably one of the most basic forms of democratic empowerment. Governments curtail such basic freedoms using laws that address defamation or sedition, using powers to punish such criticism through extradition and interpol agreements, and using powers to shut down such content with cooperation from providers such as ISPs, Google, FB, Twitter, or AWS. It would be empowering to a large volume of humanity if there's a queryable up-to-date database that can answer the seemingly simple question "where and how can I safely express my opinions about my government without being shut down or being punished?" A database of web hosts and other infra around the world with all relevant information about extradition and other legal aspects between the querying user's country and the hosting country, so that every citizen in any country can express themselves without fear of being censored or punished. I searched hard for such information in the past, but couldn't find anything much. I think such democratization can happen only if principled techs voluntarily donate time to work on them, and focus on peer-to-peer architectural principles. Tor is a good example of such democratization, but many more are needed, and some of them - like the database above, basic identity recognition, ANPR - seem to me to be low-hanging fruits that can be solved through crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer storage and processing.