China’s Golden Shield
December 24th, 2007An interesting story in Wired about life behind China’s “Golden Shield” aka the Great Firewall. Here’s a clipping.
For all its ambition, the gears of the giant surveillance machine keep getting fouled with sand. On one side of the Great Firewall, a small industry is sprouting up, dedicated to evading blocks and monitors. Libertarian software engineers, enterprising students, banned religious groups, and regular for-profit companies compete with one another to launch new downloadable tools that outfox the censors. They exploit proxy servers, deploy encryption technology, and ferret out holes in the wall. I have spent many afternoons in the Internet cafés of Beijing’s Haidian University district, learning from the students who live in this world. For a dollar an hour, they will help anyone hack the system: set up secure SSH and VPN connections, use a circumvention tool called UltraSurf developed by the banned Falun Gong group, access unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks. Their techniques confirm John Gilmore’s adage: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Makes me wonder how high a priority enforcing the firewall is, if kids can hang out in a cafe offering these services. Maybe authorities are just resigned to the futility of enforcement except in cases that they perceive as threatening? What type of people subvert the firewall, and for what purposes? To access, or to publish? Is this a trivial thing for the average person meeting their information needs, or does it constitute a radical act? What are these “unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks”? I need to read up on UltraSurf too.
Sources: Wired Article /BoingBoing