[dewayne at warpspeed.com: [Dewayne-Net] Chinese Censors Of Internet Face 'Hacktivists' in U.S.]
Eugen Leitl
eugen at leitl.org
Tue Feb 14 10:53:00 UTC 2006
----- Forwarded message from Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com> -----
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:27:03 -0800
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Chinese Censors Of Internet Face 'Hacktivists' in
U.S.
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.746.2)
Reply-To: dewayne at warpspeed.com
[Note: This item comes from friend John McMullen. DLH]
>From: "John F. McMullen" <observer at westnet.com>
>Date: February 13, 2006 3:50:53 PM PST
>To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup at yahoogroups.com>
>Cc: Dave Farber <farber at cis.upenn.edu>, Dewayne Hendricks
><dewayne at warpspeed.com>
>Subject: Chinese Censors Of Internet Face 'Hacktivists' in U.S.
>
>From the Wall Street Journal -- <http://online.wsj.com/article/
>SB113979965346572150.html?mod=home_page_one_us>
>
>Chinese Censors Of Internet Face 'Hacktivists' in U.S.
>Programs Like Freegate, Built By Expatriate Bill Xia,
>Keep the Web World-Wide Teenager Gets His Wikipedia
>By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
>
>Surfing the Web last fall, a Chinese high-school student who calls
>himself Zivn noticed something missing. It was Wikipedia, an online
>encyclopedia that accepts contributions or edits from users, and
>that he himself had contributed to.
>
>The Chinese government, in October, had added Wikipedia to a list
>of Web sites and phrases it blocks from Internet users. For Zivn,
>trying to surf this and many other Web sites, including the BBC's
>Chinese-language news service, brought just an error message. But
>the 17-year-old had loved the way those sites helped him put
>China's official pronouncements in perspective. "There were so many
>lies among the facts, and I could not find where the truth is," he
>writes in an instant-message interview.
>
>Then some friends told him where to find Freegate, a software
>program that thwarts the Chinese government's vast system to limit
>what its citizens see. Freegate -- by connecting computers inside
>of China to servers in the U.S. -- enables Zivn and others to keep
>reading and writing to Wikipedia and countless other Web sites.
>
>
>Behind Freegate is a North Carolina-based Chinese hacker named Bill
>Xia. He calls it his red pill, a reference to the drug in the
>"Matrix" movies that vaulted unconscious captives of a totalitarian
>regime into the real world. Mr. Xia likes to refer to the
>villainous Agent Smith from the Matrix films, noting that the
>digital bad guy in sunglasses "guards the Matrix like China's
>Public Security Bureau guards the Internet."
>
>Roughly a dozen Chinese government agencies employ thousands of Web
>censors, Internet cafe police and computers that constantly screen
>traffic for forbidden content and sources -- a barrier often called
>the Great Firewall of China. Type, say, "media censorship by China"
>into emails, chats or Web logs, and the messages never arrive.
>
>Even with this extensive censorship, Chinese are getting vast
>amounts of information electronically that they never would have
>found a decade ago. The growth of the Internet in China -- to an
>estimated 111 million users -- was one reason the authorities,
>after a week's silence, ultimately had to acknowledge a disastrous
>toxic spill in a river late last year. But the government recently
>has redoubled its efforts to narrow the Net's reach on sensitive
>matters.
>
>It has required all bloggers, or writers of Web logs, to register.
>At the end of last year 15 Internet writers were in jail in China,
>according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York
>group. China also has gotten some U.S. Internet companies to limit
>the search results they provide or the discussions they host on
>their Chinese services. A tiny firm Mr. Xia set up to provide and
>maintain Freegate had to lobby computer-security companies such as
>Symantec Corp., of Cupertino, Calif., not to treat it as a virus.
>
>In response to China's crackdown, and to restrictions in many
>Middle Eastern countries as well, a small army has been mustered to
>defeat them. "Hacktivists," they call themselves.
>
>Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft
>programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It
>connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and
>the Middle East so they can use their hosts' personal computers to
>read forbidden sites.
>
>Susan Stevens, a Las Vegas graphic designer, belongs to an "adopt a
>blog" program. She has adopted a Chinese blogger by using her own
>server in the U.S. to broadcast his very personal musings on
>religion to the world. She has never left the U.S., but "this is
>where technology excels," she says. "We don't have to have anything
>in common. We barely have to speak the same language."
>
>In Boston, computer scientist Roger Dingledine tends to Tor, a
>modified version of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, which
>disguises the identities of Chinese Web surfers by sending messages
>through several layers of hosts to obscure their path. In addition
>to the Department of Defense, Mr. Dingledine had also received
>funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group
>that supports free speech online.
>
>Freegate has advantages over some of its peers. As the product of
>ethnically Chinese programmers, it uses the language and fits the
>culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just
>137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and
>pass along on a portable memory drive.
>
>Mr. Xia says about 100,000 users a day use Freegate or two other
>censorship-defeating systems he helped to create. It is impossible
>to confirm that claim, but Freegate and similar programs from
>others, called UltraReach and Garden Networks, are becoming a part
>of the surfing habits of China's Internet elite in universities,
>cafes and newsrooms.
>
>A Big Booster
>
>Freegate has a big booster in Falun Gong, the spiritual group China
>banned in 1999 as subversive. It is a practice of meditations and
>breathing exercises based on moralistic teachings by its founder,
>Li Hongzhi. Chinese expatriates -- marrying U.S. free-speech
>politics with protests over persecution of Falun Gong practitioners
>in China -- have focused their energy on breaking China's
>censorship systems. They have nurtured the work of Mr. Xia, himself
>a Falun Gong follower, and several other programmers
>
>Freegate also gets a financial boost from the U.S. government.
>Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, part of the federal
>government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, pay Mr. Xia and
>others to send out emails featuring links to their stories.
>
>Kenneth Berman, manager of the anticensorship office of the board's
>International Broadcasting Bureau, declines to say how much it
>compensates Mr. Xia's company. He says the bureau pays less than $5
>million a year to companies to help combat Internet censorship
>abroad, especially in China and Iran.
>
>"Our policy is to allow individuals to get anything they want, when
>they want," Mr. Berman says. "Bill and his techniques help us do
>that."
>
>Human Rights in China, a New York nonprofit group funded by
>individuals and charities founded by Chinese scientists and
>scholars in 1989, also helps fund Mr. Xia's enterprise, which runs
>on a budget of about $1 million a year, and pays it to send out
>emails.
>
>The resources behind Freegate and others hacktivists could increase
>if Congress revives a bill to create an Office of Global Internet
>Freedom. U.S. Internet companies have drawn strong criticism in
>Congress for compliance with Chinese Web restriction, and hearings
>on their activities are set for Wednesday. Microsoft Corp.,
>Redmond, Wash., Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and Yahoo Inc.,
>Sunnyvale, Calif., all say that they abide by local laws.
>Microsoft's general counsel said this month that the software giant
>shuts down personal blogs only if it receives a "legally binding
>notice from a government."
>
>Several Chinese agencies with jurisdiction over the Internet,
>including the ministries of Public Security, State Security, and
>Information Industry, didn't respond to faxed questions about
>Internet filtering. The State Council Information Office said the
>government would hold a news conference to address "Internet
>security" issues early this week. It didn't respond to specific
>questions. A position paper issued in 2000 by the National People's
>Congress said it is a criminal offense to use the Internet to
>"incite subversion," to "divulge state secrets" or to "organize
>cults." The paper said the laws were needed "to promote the good
>and eliminate the bad, encourage the healthy development of the
>Internet [and] safeguard the security of the State and the public
>interest."
>
>It is this attitude that drives Mr. Xia's counterattack. Moving to
>the U.S. a decade ago to begin graduate studies in physics, he
>says, he never imagined becoming either a dissident or a
>programmer. Slowly, he became more uncomfortable with China's
>restriction of public discourse. In the U.S., he watched taped
>footage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square assault on protesters.
>
>Mr. Xia says he taught himself computer science out of textbooks
>and in 2002 set up a small company called Dynamic Internet
>Technology Inc., hiring 10 people to help send out emails for such
>clients as Voice of America. He says he takes no salary, living a
>modest life off his savings and his wife's earnings.
>
>Often working alone at his computer until 3 a.m., Mr. Xia lives
>like a secret agent, communicating with a small team of volunteer
>programmers across North America over secure email or coded phone
>calls. He combs his house with a device to detect the loose radio
>waves of bugging devices. In his 30s, Mr. Xia asked that the city
>in which he lives and works not be disclosed so he can maintain a
>low profile.
>
>The programmer says he dashes to his computer as soon as he wakes
>up each morning, to make sure his system is still intact. He keeps
>a raft of programs running on his oversize flat-screen monitor,
>testing Freegate through a dozen different Web browsers and instant-
>message and chat programs.
>
>Freegate works by constantly changing the address of its U.S.
>servers so that China can't block the connection, and users like
>Zivn, the 17-year-old, can read and write at will. Zivn says he
>uses Freegate three to four times a week to read domestic and
>international news. Besides the BBC site he frequents Radio Free
>Asia and the Epoch Times, a newspaper that champions Falun Gong.
>All have Chinese-language news services normally blocked by China's
>firewall.
>
>Zivn says he isn't a member of Falun Gong and describes his
>political slant as "neutral." He says he has read about North
>Korean leader Kim Jong Il's recent secret visit to China and the
>closure of a liberal Chinese magazine called Freezing Point. He
>says he has copied some foreign news reports onto his personal
>blog, which is available inside China and periodically gets blocked
>itself.
>
>One user, who describes himself online as a 22-year-old who works
>in Chinese media, praises the software but adds that its use is
>"limited to a small group of people who are knowledgeable about
>computers and the Internet." Most Chinese, he says, "have not
>realized the harmful effects from network blocking." China's
>Internet control system, called Golden Shield, doesn't aim for
>complete control over information but rather to discover and plug
>major breaches in the firewall.
>
>Nor can Freegate prevent self-censorship. Many Chinese surfers and
>bloggers, having a sense of the forbidden words and topics, check
>themselves before they cross the line.
>
>Then, too, many Chinese are as frivolous in their Internet use as
>anyone else. Most of China's estimated 33 million bloggers write
>about entertainment, fashion and such, not the free-speech or
>police crackdowns. Still, Mr. Xia says he sees a rise in Freegate
>traffic after events such as democracy protests or corruption
>scandals, which the state-controlled press doesn't cover.
>
>Freegate's Web site supports an effort by Falun Gong's Epoch Times
>to get Chinese citizens who belong to the Communist Party to
>renounce their membership, and the paper claims nearly eight
>million have signed a petition doing so. Many did so through
>Freegate, Mr. Xia says.
>
>Mr. Xia says he gets a mountain of feedback. He convinced Symantec
>not to treat Freegate as a virus. "The users are not technical.
>They just say, 'It doesn't work!' and we have to ask them a lot of
>questions" to resolve problems, Mr. Xia says. He politely declines
>the help of volunteers inside China, fearing that they might be
>government spies or that they would be punished if discovered.
>
>Getting Tips
>
>Occasionally, he says, he gets tips from Chinese who say they have
>been given the job of maintaining the Internet restrictions. "One
>guy told us, 'Sorry, I participated in some efforts to block your
>software. I think it is not going to work in a few days,' " Mr. Xia
>says. "China may have many people working on the firewall, but for
>them it is just a job."
>
>[snip]
>Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler at wsj.com
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com
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