Can Technology Beat Internet Censors?
I found this interesting article on BBC; That discusses how people that use the internet are trying to find ways to beat the blocks that keep them from viewing certain material on the net. ENJOY!
Can technology beat the internet censors?
Paul Mason
27 Oct 06, 09:31 PM
Its predecessor is 2000 years old but the Great Firewall of China is the wonder of the online world - so powerful that it can control net access for a fifth of humanity - it represents China's determination to control what's supposed to be uncontrollable - and it works. Watch my report here. In 2004 Shi Tao, a journalist in contact with democracy websites, took notes of a government briefing concerning how he should report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and sent it using his Yahoo email account. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison....
At his trial the prosecution presented
"Account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd which confirms that for IP address 218,76.8.20 at 11.32.17pm,,,the corresponding user information was as follows...."
You can read the full trial proceedings here: his 10 year sentence was classed as "lenient".
Yahoo had handed over crucial information linking Shi's anonymous Yahoo email account to the Chinese police.
Today Amnesty International launched a campaign to highlight the plight of bloggers, chatroom members and online journalists on the receiving end of net censorship. Amnesty's Kate Allen told us: "We want Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to stand up to values they say they espouse. Access to information, freedom on the internet. We want people who use those companies to make their views clear so we don't end up with a two-tier internet."
Yahoo told us:
"We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression. The case of Shi Tao is distressing to us. However, law enforcement agencies worldwide are not required to explain businesses why they demand specific information regarding certain individuals. The case is a real example of why this issue is bigger than any one company and any one industry."
But I've been finding out that techie web users themselves are inventing ways to monitor and, increasingly, get around web censorship. the Open Net Initiative now publishes regular metrics on how, when and what is banned in countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Meanwhile I've noticed that there's a little known tool on the Google Labs website, called the Google Web Accelerator, that - as well as speeding up access to Google - just happens to encrypt your searches. I don't know whether it's available in China, but it's the kind of thing savvy web users in repressive countries are quietly using to keep their sessions away from the attention of the authorities. So three cheers for the 80:20 principle, where Google's engineers get a day a week to work on hobbies like this.
For a real heavy duty two-fingers job to regimes like Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh, users are turning to a programme called Freenet. It's a peer to peer programme that scrambles the data, spreads it around the hard disk of every user, and sends queries for data around a path so convoluted that only a London cabbie with a taxi-full of hapless tourists could match it. See it here - but beware you have no way of knowing whether you are helping host a Chinese democracy website or porn - and there is no case law in Britain yet that says scrambling the data is a defence.
Theodore Hong, one of the pioneers of Freenet, tells me there's a Chinese version that's being distributed on floppies and CDs. One of the downsides though, is that if we are all forced to start using tools like Freenet, the internet could just become a series of closed user-communities where only the trusted talk to each other and outsiders are viewed with suspicion.
So next week's UN conference on Internet Governance in Athens (sadly Newsnight's budget does not stretch to Athens since Justin Rowlatt blew it all in Jamaica) will be important. Some repressive countries want there to be more national control of access to the web, weakening ICANN, the global regulator: they might get more support than you would think because ICANN, while nominally global, is based in the USA and there's a lot of suspicion of that.
I talked to a big internet company today who are worried about this trend - and they said: why doesn't the UK government push censorship up the trade agenda, moving it into the WTO negotiations. The UK government made sympathetic noises about that, but pointed out that trade is handled by Brussels. They said no more, but it is well known that France wants a strong national influence on global controls - so the EU is not united over solutions to the kind of censorship that put Shi Tao in jail. As always hit the comment button.
Paul Mason
27 Oct 06, 09:31 PM
Its predecessor is 2000 years old but the Great Firewall of China is the wonder of the online world - so powerful that it can control net access for a fifth of humanity - it represents China's determination to control what's supposed to be uncontrollable - and it works. Watch my report here. In 2004 Shi Tao, a journalist in contact with democracy websites, took notes of a government briefing concerning how he should report the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and sent it using his Yahoo email account. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison....
At his trial the prosecution presented
"Account holder information furnished by Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd which confirms that for IP address 218,76.8.20 at 11.32.17pm,,,the corresponding user information was as follows...."
You can read the full trial proceedings here: his 10 year sentence was classed as "lenient".
Yahoo had handed over crucial information linking Shi's anonymous Yahoo email account to the Chinese police.
Today Amnesty International launched a campaign to highlight the plight of bloggers, chatroom members and online journalists on the receiving end of net censorship. Amnesty's Kate Allen told us: "We want Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to stand up to values they say they espouse. Access to information, freedom on the internet. We want people who use those companies to make their views clear so we don't end up with a two-tier internet."
Yahoo told us:
"We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression. The case of Shi Tao is distressing to us. However, law enforcement agencies worldwide are not required to explain businesses why they demand specific information regarding certain individuals. The case is a real example of why this issue is bigger than any one company and any one industry."
But I've been finding out that techie web users themselves are inventing ways to monitor and, increasingly, get around web censorship. the Open Net Initiative now publishes regular metrics on how, when and what is banned in countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Meanwhile I've noticed that there's a little known tool on the Google Labs website, called the Google Web Accelerator, that - as well as speeding up access to Google - just happens to encrypt your searches. I don't know whether it's available in China, but it's the kind of thing savvy web users in repressive countries are quietly using to keep their sessions away from the attention of the authorities. So three cheers for the 80:20 principle, where Google's engineers get a day a week to work on hobbies like this.
For a real heavy duty two-fingers job to regimes like Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh, users are turning to a programme called Freenet. It's a peer to peer programme that scrambles the data, spreads it around the hard disk of every user, and sends queries for data around a path so convoluted that only a London cabbie with a taxi-full of hapless tourists could match it. See it here - but beware you have no way of knowing whether you are helping host a Chinese democracy website or porn - and there is no case law in Britain yet that says scrambling the data is a defence.
Theodore Hong, one of the pioneers of Freenet, tells me there's a Chinese version that's being distributed on floppies and CDs. One of the downsides though, is that if we are all forced to start using tools like Freenet, the internet could just become a series of closed user-communities where only the trusted talk to each other and outsiders are viewed with suspicion.
So next week's UN conference on Internet Governance in Athens (sadly Newsnight's budget does not stretch to Athens since Justin Rowlatt blew it all in Jamaica) will be important. Some repressive countries want there to be more national control of access to the web, weakening ICANN, the global regulator: they might get more support than you would think because ICANN, while nominally global, is based in the USA and there's a lot of suspicion of that.
I talked to a big internet company today who are worried about this trend - and they said: why doesn't the UK government push censorship up the trade agenda, moving it into the WTO negotiations. The UK government made sympathetic noises about that, but pointed out that trade is handled by Brussels. They said no more, but it is well known that France wants a strong national influence on global controls - so the EU is not united over solutions to the kind of censorship that put Shi Tao in jail. As always hit the comment button.
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