http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06045/654754.stm By Geoffrey A. Fowler The Wall Street Journal February 14, 2006 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' access. 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 had a taste of that wealth of information and wanted more. "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 tiny 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. -- allows Zivn and others to keep reading and writing to Wikipedia and countless other 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." It isn't all science fiction. China is aggressively moving to control the Internet. Even as the 50 million Internet connections within the country grow faster, contact with the rest of the Web is growing muddier. 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 Internet 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-based group. And China 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. not to treat it as a virus. In response to China's crackdown and restrictions in many Middle Eastern countries, a small army has been mustered to defeat them. "Hacktivists," they call themselves. Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft Corp. 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. 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 that about 100,000 users a day currently use Freegate or two other censorship-defeating systems he helped 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. Freegate has a key 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 Broadacasting 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. But he says the bureau pays about $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, also helps fund Mr. Xia's enterprise, which runs on a budget of about $1 million a year. The resources behind Freegate and other hactivists 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, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. 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." [...] _________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org
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