The simple answer is that if a vendor provides a technology that can be used to facilitate crime, that vendor emphasizes that they made the technology for some nominally lawful purpose. The record companies asserted that cassette tapes were designed to infringe copyright, the manufacturers stressed that they recorded what-ever and there were lots of non-infringing uses for them. Plausible deniability as a stategy perhaps.
DeusEx's question boils down to, ``why does the company claim to serve law-breakers (here: citizens breaking censorship), but as soon as law enforcement knocked on their doors, they gave all the info away''. Which is a fair question to ask.
Somehow, the company claims to serve only ethical law breakers, and they want do the judging on ethics.
I read it that Deuce set up a strawman : "If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things. If you still do it, you get arrested because you are breaking the law. This is an illegal activity and they should cooperate with law enforcement, as stated in the first point."
The fallacy here is embedded in the amphiboly that 'government' in the first part is the same 'legal basis' in the second part. There is no law in the US about getting around Chinese censorship, nor does skirting the web nanny protections of a high school rise to the level of law breaking, so much as terms of service breaking (which is a civil matter).
HMA can, and does, claim they have legitimate uses. In order for them to be tolerated by 'law enforcement' they must have such uses otherwise they are simply hunted down like any other criminal activity.
But they also have to cooperate with the authorities when it is brought to their attention or face becoming tainted by illegal use of their service. Another good example of this is BitTorrent right? They have a service which some people use to infringe copyright but the service isn't about that, its a "general purpose peer to peer data distribution engine."
