[Air-l] censorship work arounds

[Barry Wellman]

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  Barry Wellman   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology   NetLab Director
  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
        for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
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November 27, 2006
Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor
By CHRISTOPHER MASON

TORONTO, Nov. 21 — Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a
team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking
activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most
advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government
censorship of the Web.

The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on
Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens
in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated
programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored
material.

“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of
the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What
might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news
organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites,
health information sites and many others.”

Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country
(psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access
point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that
computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain
access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence
on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase
their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader
effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the
Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those
living in restrictive countries.

“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible
extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise
that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr.
Deibert said.

When it opened in 2000, the Citizen Lab, which is one of four institutions
in the OpenNet Initiative (opennetinitiative.org), was actively monitoring
a handful of countries, mainly China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that censored
the Internet. But citing increased filtering by governments, the lab now
monitors more than 40 countries.

The program’s designers say existing anticensorship programs are too
complicated for everyday computer users, leave evidence on the user’s
computer and lack security in part because they have to be advertised
publicly, making it easy for censors to detect and block access to them.

“Now you will have potentially thousands, even tens of thousands, of
private proxies that are almost impossible for censors to follow one by
one,” said Qiang Xiao, director of the China Internet Project at the
University of California, Berkeley.

Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password
information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social
circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep
the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it
limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.

The software is also designed to allow users to post on blogs and other
Web sites like Wikipedia, which has been a problem for some other
anticensorship programs. By requiring only login information and no
installation, psiphon is intended for anyone with basic computer knowledge
because psiphon functions much the same as any typical browser.

“So far it’s been tech solutions for tech people,” said Dmitri Vitaliev, a
human rights activist in Russia who has been testing psiphon in countries
where the Internet is censored. “We have not had very good tools so
everyone has been eagerly awaiting psiphon.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company