Unfortuantely far too many people come from states where whois information freely avaialble on the net can cost them and their families their well being or their lives.
There are certainly countries with oppressive governments. But anyone who would ask a person in a situation like that to depend on some random registrar or registry's privacy policy to keep them from being disappeared would be an idiot. As has been noted about a zillion times before, people in such a situation would need to find a trusted intermediary to arrange for web or mail hosting and internet access, and if they want a domain, the intermediary can arrange for that, too. Unlike many (perhaps all) of the other people in this argument, I'm not speaking hypothetically. There is a widely used spam blacklist called the CBL at cbl.abuseat.org, which criminal spammers dislike enough to have made death threats against the person who operates it. Real, no kidding, law enforcement investigated death threats. If you check the WHOIS info for abuseat.org, you will find actual contact information. If you call the phone number, which is in California, a polite person will answer. If you ask nicely, she will take a message for the CBL. The person who runs the CBL is in a different country, and she most definitely will not provide the person's name or what country it is. This is the reality. I cannot imagine why people are making the same arguements that were an insult to our intelligence in 1998, and haven't improved with time. R's, John