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One event in which the Chinese authorities are almost certain to win gold medals is the Internet surveillance and censorship race. Since the start of the century, they have led the world in policing the Net and actively jailing those who treat it as a platform for free expression. Technology and solidarity, however, can help the Chinese netizens break through the Great Firewall. The Internet police in China number in the tens of thousands. They regularly scan and add new websites to the national blacklists. Speedy Google (or the like) can assist in finding freshly published websites containing ‘damaging information’. Surveillance of Internet communications also operates with banned keywords. Should you write ‘falun dafa’ in an email message or a tomSkype (the Chinese version of Skype) conversation or should these words appear in the content of a web page, then the connection will be broken by the Firewall. |
Did You Know?
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There are several ways to circumvent Internet censorship and protect yourself from digital surveillance. One idea might be to post information as a graphic online. Print out your article, take a photo with your digital camera and upload the jpeg. This will prevent search engines and Firewall filters from reading your post’s content and it will take considerably longer for the Internet Police to find.
You should use webmail services that operate over SSL. This means those that maintain the ‘https://’ address during login and throughout the entire session. They make surveillance of email messages much more difficult. Blog posts and website contributions should be made via such webmail services. Gmail can operate entirely over SSL if opened in the first instance at ‘https://mail.google.com ‘ Others include https://mail.riseup.net , https://fastmail.fm , https://bluebottle.co.uk and https://vaultletsoft.com for the extra security minded.
The best solutions for bypassing Internet censorship at the moment, are those that rely on ‘Western’ computers acting as a gateway for Chinese Internet users. If you have friends or relatives that live in China, set up the Psiphon (http://psiphon.civisec.org) software to create a proxy server on your own computer for their use. Even if you do not know anyone in China, install the Tor (http://torproject.org) software and register to become a bridge in the Tor anonymity network.
This will benefit those living in Internet restrictive regimes and make the Tor network virtually unblockable.
For more info see http://equalit.ie/secbox
Dmitri Vitaliev is a consultant on information security and strategy for human rights and independent media organisations. He is the author of the ‘Digital Security for Human Rights Defenders’ manual of the NGO in a Box – Security Edition team.
