Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

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.