It's all about proxies. In Tear Down This Cyberwall!, he explains why the Iranian government has not been able to completely block internet access from within the country. Despite the governmental efforts
a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.
I am aware of the current recommended diary by electronicmaji that also talks about providing proxies, but Kristof's focus is elsewhere, and well worth reading.
I invite you to continue reading this diary, which will explore the Kristof column and make a few unrelated observations.
Thanks to people like electronicmaji regular readers of this site already know about the use of proxies. He talks with Shiyu Zhou, "a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium" who is "the son of a Chinese army general." Zhou said
he and his colleagues began to develop such software after the 1999 Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong (which the authorities denounce as a cult). One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site."
Yesterday their servers recorded more than 200 million hits from over 400,000 people in Iran. To give some context, in 2008 the CIA factbook showed that nation's population at just under 66 million, while the official census of 2006 claimed 70 million. In other words, a population a bit over 1/5 that of the US, which has something over 320 million people. The level of participation yesterday was the equivalent of around 2 million Americans doing a billion hits. While that might seem like a miniscule portion of the population - under 1% - it is still substantial enough to cause a major breach in the Iranian government's attempts to seal international electronic access to the goings on in the country.
The software was originally available only in English and Chinese. A Farsi version was introduced last July, and the usage was so heavy that for a while the consortium cut off access to its servers, only restoring after the election - which I suppose parallels the government's attempts to electronically seal the country.
The Chinese government has attempted to block access by requiring new computers sold in the country to have Internet filtering software called "Green Dam," but the consortium has already responded:
the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it
Kristof also mentions an incident where a Consortium engineer in Atlanta was beaten up (?by Chinese agents) in 2006, which raises the importance of the incident elecronicmaji reports in the diary today.
Kristof wants the US Government to help efforts such as this:
If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an "Internet freedom initiative" pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.
This is an effort supported by human rights activists around the world, and by people such as Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.
As I read Kristof's column, several thoughts ran through my mind. I imagine people at the NSA - particularly under the watch of someone like General Michael Hayden, insisting that any such development funded by the US include a backdoor that would enable the NSA to locate the source of any user of such a proxy. I'm not sure I would want the US Government administering such funds. Similarly, I can imagine that the FBI would strongly object for similar reasons, for fear that organized crime groups and terrorist groups could use such technology as a means of evading wiretapping - if the technology prevented identifying a specific IP address or person whose communications could be monitored/gathered, the FBI would almost certainly want the authority to have regular access to all traffic passing through the servers of such proxies.
Another thought occurred. So often we worried about the "1984" scenario, where the government used technology to monitor and control society and suppress dissent. Yet is it not possible that technology is developing so fast that it may serve to undercut a government's ability to control its usage, and that situations like the Falun Gong and now those sporting Green in Iran are able to fight back at governmental attempts to restrict their access to information? Kristof notes
it does make a difference when people inside closed regimes get access to information — which is why dictatorships make such efforts to block comprehensive Internet access.
and offers in support a Chinese journalist with dissident leanings who was strongly pro-government until getting access to information through the internet.
Kristof rightly notes the 1979 Iranian revolution occurred without such technology. That reminded me that our government allowed SAVAK, the Sha's notoriously brutal secret service, to operate against dissidents in the US. Tales of Consortium people being beaten up or threatened raises questions of what access by human proxies of governments in places like Iran and China have been tolerated, or if our efforts at counterintelligence have been too limited to prevent future attacks like these. After all, even with recent crackdowns on foreign students, it is not unreasonable to believe that governments willing to repress their dissidents would not take advantage of every opportunity, including planting agents as sleepers among the student populations in the United States.
Let me offer one other thought, perhaps not as important as the issues already raised, by Kristof, and in my mental meanderings earlier in this post. Many school systems have regulations that could lead to punishment for students who use technology to criticize teachers and/or to pass on information about the content of tests. I can conceive of the use of proxies through handheld devices which would make it impossible to trace the source of such postings to an individual device, even were the device confiscated. I have students who as sophomores are already beyond the offerings of our AP Computer Science classes. I periodically remind people that Sergei Brin is a graduate of our high school, and often serves as an exemplar from some of our more ambitious hackers (using that term in its original sense as people creative in their uses of computer technology).
As we watch the use of technology to help the Iranians, even if ultimately they fail, we should also be thinking of the implications for our own society. All of the implications.
And remember - sometimes even paranoids have enemies.
Peace.