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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 64 what we call black box computers that are set up in countries around the world that we control ourselves through a secure shell account, allowing us to test 24/7. The software connects back to databases in Toronto and Cambridge in which we have put together thousands of urls (Internet addresses) and key words. There are two main baskets of data, the global list and the local list. The global list includes urls on everything from civil rights to pornography. We run it in every country that we test in, and then we also run a local list which varies from country to country. These lists are put together by locals who understand the context and these consist of web sites, key words and urls, usually in the local languages, that the experts expect will be targeted for filtering in the country under investigation. Again, local experts are very important to this research. More than 20 languages are used in the construction of the local language tests, and we are presently running tests as we speak in 71 countries around the world. We have been investigating China for several years. We have produced a major report in 2004 2005, updated 2006-7. We intend to continue to do this throughout the period leading up to and after the Olympics, so that we can gauge exactly what is being filtered. We categorize China as the world's most active filterer of Internet content. It employs technical, legal and social means to try to control access. We found that filtering is centralized in China. No matter where you connect from, at some point you meet the filters at the main international gateways at the backbone of the network, and the filtering that takes place there is remarkably consistent. There are basically three methods that are used. The first interferes with the system that cross-references domain names, such as www. example.com with the numerical address. When you try to access a filtered web site the translation to the numerical address gets redirected to a non-existent site so it looks to all intents and purposes from the user's perspective as if something is wrong with the site or it doesn't exist. China also employs Internet protocol blocking, which affects the way the actual numbers are programmed into the routers, and key word filtering in the urls. There are rumors also of scanning for key words in the body of the text. As far as we know, that has not yet happened, but the way we are testing now will enable us to find out. Technical filtering is combined with extensive legal mechanisms - laws that prescribe and restrain what can be done on line. Most of these have the intent of devolving responsibility down to the user level, whether that is the actual user or the Internet service provider. The Western search engines that operate in China, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, try to be accommodating to the Internet censorship regime by de-indexing search results, removing results from queries. The Internet telephony service Skype uses a similar filtering system on its chat service. Lastly, there are social controls. Self-discipline pacts, where telecommunications operators agree that they will cooperate with the regime, are an extension of the climate of self-
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 65 censorship. Together, these technical, legal and social means are the mechanisms that are used to create a matrix of controls in China. It is a contractual point with the International Olympic Committee that journalists must have free access to the Internet, but the big question is how will this happen? One way that has already begun is through an easing of restrictions. There have been some sites that have been perennially blocked in China that are being slowly unblocked, and it interesting to note that these are mostly English-language web sites. The BBC for example was recently unblocked in China. Local language and local issues will still be filtered but, of course, foreign journalists going to China tend not to look at those sites. There is also talk of assigning blocks of Internet protocol addresses to foreign journalists. That is certainly possible but, it is difficult to manage because you must control the access points, such as hotel rooms. A similar system was set up in Tunisia at the World Summit on the Information Society, where part of the convention had free Internet access and another building in the convention did not. So something like that is certainly possible, but it would be very difficult to enforce, and I am sure that foreign journalists traveling to China if they knew what to look for would bump up against Internet filtering. Let me turn now to getting around Internet censorship. There are many ways. For example, one very simple method to avoid key word filtering is to enter the numerical address of the site that is blocked. One method the Chinese use is to connect to proxy servers based outside of the country. The most common way is to find a server set up in open public forums. But that ends up on the block list and you have to find a new proxy. Of course, it is a very insecure way of getting around Internet censorship because you don't know who is setting up the proxy, and a lot of the proxies are in plain text, meaning that the content is easy to intercept. On top of that, it is not easy to set up a proxy computer for someone who is not technical. The Psiphon project aims to get over these weaknesses and shortcomings. The more you understand how Internet filtering systems work, the better you understand how to get around them. What we wanted to do was to create a method whose main innovation is not so much technological as social. Psiphon is a tool used within private social networks of trust. Instead of advertising connections to a proxy you set it up privately and you give the connection information only to a few friends, trusted family members or people within your organization. To make Psiphon easy to use, we bundle all the different steps that are required to set up a server on a home computer into one small application that anyone can download. It was released in December 2006 as a free, open source tool. About 150,000 downloads have been made since then. There is nothing to download or instal from the user side. We are working on a new web-based version of Psiphon that is distinct from the original in that it is entirely web-based, with no need to download and instal. The Psiphon service will operate thousands of connection nodes which we will assign to groups and organizations.
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