Over plain http, how would you solve the problem of a government modifying pages in transit or replacing them entirely with a new version? I suppose you could use the https public key infrastructure with digital signatures so that visitors know whether they're seeing the original...
Well, if you want that property, technically there was NULL encryption algorithm in early HTTPS versions (probably it's not supported now, but there's nothing unusual about it). So you'll have page in cleartext, including all headers (so censors can drop the connection if they don't like it), but you'll have associated checksums and certificates, so changes should be detectable.
