Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor

Published in the New York Times
November 27, 2006

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.”

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Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

WIRED and Macleans

There have been a couple of news items concerning research at the Citizen Lab.

The first is a news item from WIRED News concerning the ongoing activities of the OpenNet Initiative. We have recently completed testing in nearly 40 countries worldwide (not the 50 the magazine claims) and our researchers gathered at Berkman Center for Internet & Society to begin to pull together the analysis of the results. We’ll be reporting soon on all of the countries in a major volume, coming probably early next year.

The second is a Macleans magazine article on our upcoming release of our psiphon censorship circumvention software at the December 1st Protect the Net event. There appears to be no online version of the article, but I’ve posted a low resolution PDF here for academic archiving purposes only.

IGF Forum Athens

I participated in the Internet Governance Forum today, on a panel with fellow panelists Ambassador David Gross of the United States, Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, Fred Tipson of Microsoft, and others. I was checking in through a videoconference connection, which made it a little difficult to hear what my fellow panelists were saying, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. It appears that the event has been picked up by Associated Press, however, and so has been reprinted in numerous publications, such as here, here, and here.

BBC on Psiphon

There has been a few news items recently concerning some of our projects at the Citizen Lab. The BBC’s The World had a report on developments in Iranian censorship of the Internet, giving special attention to our soon-to-be-released (December 1st) software project, psiphon. The interview was with the Citizen Lab’s director of technical research, Nart Villeneuve. You can listen to it here.

OpenNet Initiative releases Report on Vietnam

In a recently issued report, ONI finds an increase in Internet censorship in Vietnam. Drawing from technical, legal, and political sources, ONI’s research finds that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is focusing its filtering on sites considered threatening to its one-party system. Furthermore, the technical sophistication, breadth, and effectiveness of Vietnam’s filtering are increasing with time. Similar to China, Vietnam has taken a multi-layered approach to controlling the Internet; Vietnam applies technical controls, the law, and education to restrict its citizens’ access to and use of information. Vietnam is carrying out this filtering with a notable lack of transparency – while Vietnam claims its blocking efforts are aimed at safeguarding the country against obscene or sexually explicit content, most of its filtering efforts target sites with politically or religiously sensitive material that could undermine Vietnam’s one-party system.

The full report can be found HERE.

A Censored Network: Iran

Richard Rogers’ Govcom.org foundation has been doing cutting edge research on online networks for years, producing visually rich outputs that show connections among major nodes, typically using their issue crawler tool.

We at the OpenNet Initaitive have entered into a collaboration with Rogers and his team at Govcom.org to produce a series of issue-crawler maps of Internet censorship. The first of these is called A Censored Network (PDF), showing censored sites in Iran. Rogers and his team ran one of our high impact lists from our Iran Report through their issue-crawler. The discovered sites linking to those high impact sites were then fed through the ONI’s testing system to discover 30 additional blocked sites.

Stay tuned for more outputs from this collaboration.

Amnesty Slams Cisco

The Amnesty Irrepressibe.info campaign is continuing to raise awareness and debate about Internet censorship practices around the world. Part of the purpose of the campaign is to focus on western companies who provide technologies of censorship and surveillance. There is a ZDNet UK article about the topic, with some of my comments on the matter, and the same old responses from Cisco about how they just sell the technology, not determine how it is used. Whatever their level of support actually is, they cannot deny that they know how the technology is actually being deployed in China and elsewhere around the world.

It is interesting to see how you end up being represented in these stories. For the record, here is my exchange on the matter with the reporter:

ZDNET: Can you comment on Cisco’s involvement in China?
1. How do you know that the Chinese authorities use Cisco routing technology and hardware?

RD: I know that Chinese authorities use Cisco routing technology because Cisco themselves say that they do. Cisco does not deny that its technology is being used, as evidenced by the testimony to US Congress of Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of CiscoSystems. You can read it yourself here:

http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/109/cha021506.pdf

ZDNET: 2. Does Cisco configure the routers for the Chinese, or actively help to block access to the Internet? Does Cisco supply any other kind of service to the authorities?

RD: In the same testimony as noted above, Mr. Chandler says:

“Cisco does not customize, or develop specialized or unique filtering
capabilities, in order to enable different regimes to block access to information…”

However, this is contradicted by the testimony of Ethan Gutman, which you can find here:

http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/109/gut041906.pdf

so it is a matter of making an educated guess. Some one is not telling the truth. My educated guess is that it would be unlikely for any company to have a major contract of this sort without supplying support for one of its primary service functions.

ZDNet:3. If Cisco supplies the hardware, is this detrimental to the local population, and why? Is Cisco aware of it being detrimental?

RD:I believe not only is it detrimental to the population of China, it is a violation of human rights, as outlined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. As to whether Cisco is aware of it being detrimental, you would have to ask them.