Re: “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That comment was originally made about USENET, in the "alt.humor.funny" episode at Stanford in the early 1980s. Due to some political correctness issue, the newsgroup "alt.humor.funny" was blocked at Stanford's main USENET gateway.
USENET is an eventually-consistent database system. When USENET nodes connect, each has a list of groups it knows about. For each group a node knows, it tells the other end what item sequence numbers it has. The node being asked then provides any items the asking node doesn't have.
This really does route around censorship. Almost all the USENET traffic went through the main Stanford USENET gateway, but a few machines on campus made occasional USENET connections to outside machines. That was all it took to keep the Stanford USENET machines in sync with the outside world. Anything deleted at the main gateway was filled in over other links.
That's where the line came from. From the days when we really had distributed networking.
A subtlety is that more effective censorship was possible in USENET: by forging corrupted or redacted versions of particular posts, or, to an extent, with cancelbots. (The second is potentially less effective because people could configure systems to ignore cancel messages, but the former could work really well because USENET never had a content-integrity mechanism, so you could certainly convince nodes that they already had an article and hence didn't need to retrieve it again.)
It is also possible that a country can spy on traffic that isn't routed through that country's territory. Three things we've heard about in the last few years have been bilateral deals between spy agencies to share intercepted data, compromise of routers, and installation of clandestine physical taps, whether on land or undersea. There might be good political remedies for some of these things, but at the technical level it seems like Joseph Hall's view (from the article) is exactly right.
Edit: there were also reports about different kinds of routing manipulation, such as BGP attacks, inducing ISPs to deliberately choose surveillable routes in some cases, or inducing link outages.
It doesn't have to (or said another way: it does by default), because its routes are build with laws. However, you could also say that things like the UK surveillance-kickback agreements are a form of routing around the law, and I would agree.
USENET is an eventually-consistent database system. When USENET nodes connect, each has a list of groups it knows about. For each group a node knows, it tells the other end what item sequence numbers it has. The node being asked then provides any items the asking node doesn't have.
This really does route around censorship. Almost all the USENET traffic went through the main Stanford USENET gateway, but a few machines on campus made occasional USENET connections to outside machines. That was all it took to keep the Stanford USENET machines in sync with the outside world. Anything deleted at the main gateway was filled in over other links.
That's where the line came from. From the days when we really had distributed networking.