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Updated, Jan. 16, 9:40 a.m. | Ross Anderson of Cambridge University joins the discussion. He says the growing complexity and volume of Web traffic will only make government censorship harder.

When Google made the surprising announcement on Tuesday that it would no longer censor search results in China, it was applauded by human rights advocates around the world. Since China isn’t likely to allow unfiltered results, which would bring up banned topics, Google would have to quit operating google.cn, its Chinese search engine.

But that may not be the end of the story. The very tech savvy are starting to work around the government’s filters. Is it just a matter of time before the technologists defeat censorship broadly? What kinds of technological advances would that involve? Or will governments like China be able to maintain strong censorship control with ever more advanced technology on their side?

What Web Sites Can Do

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”

Most ways to get around filtering are on the demand side: the user has to do some work. I’d like to see some work done on the supply side, by Web sites themselves — and not just because of political censorship, but because of the many other reasons a site can become inaccessible, from a cyberattack to poor network connectivity.

We need a mutual aid treaty for the Internet, opted in one Web site at a time.

We can design new protocols so that participating Web sites can share information with one another, and in the event one goes down, others can mirror what had been there, in exchange for similar help should they be the next victims.

It’s a kind of mutual aid treaty for the Internet, opted in one Web site at a time — creating a more robust infrastructure against all sorts of blockages. Already, we’re building an infrastructure with sites like Herdict so that users can report when they can’t get to a given site — something that web site operators are keen to know. As a public early warning system develops for network trouble, the next logical step is to help patch them up as they happen.

Read more… There’s little likelihood that China would want to hermetically seal itself the way a North Korea or Cuba has sought to achieve. But there is some aspiration for a “China Wide Web” where most users would find themselves accessing local content, in Chinese, for most of their surfing. That’s why another trend to watch is the improvement of automatic translation tools. When the world’s peoples can speak fluently with one another, whether in blog comments, Wikipedia entries, tweets or instant messages, regardless of their native languages, that will be a quantum advance in the circulation of ideas.

A Matter of Cost

Steven M. Bellovin is a professor of computer science at Columbia University, where he specializes in networks, security, and why the two don’t get along.



There’s a saying in the security business: “amateurs worry about algorithms; pros worry about economics.” There’s no doubt that China — or any government so-minded — can censor virtually everything; it’s just that the cost — cutting most communications lines, and deploying enough agents to vet the rest — is prohibitive. The more interesting question is whether or not “enough” censorship is affordable.

How much effort are people and companies outside China willing to expend on anti-censoring measures?

There are a variety of techniques that dissidents can use to evade the censors, ranging from obvious things like encryption to assorted anonymous networking techniques to breaking messages up into separate pieces that are nonsensical individually but turn into a real message when enough pieces are combined.

They can even use pictures, either normal ones with hidden messages embedded (a technique known as “steganography”) to screen shots of Web pages the government wouldn’t like. Of course, there are some obvious countermeasures the government could employ, but they’re costly — optical character recognition from pictures is possible but not easy to do efficiently. China currently has more than 300,000,000 Internet users; using heavyweight censorship techniques on all international connections is probably not affordable.

Read more… Predicting what will happen requires answering three imponderable questions. First, at what rate will anti-censorship technologies evolve, compared with what the censors can do? In this case, I’d bet on the former; there are more people who can work on free communications than can work on blocking it. Second, how much effort and money will the government expend? That will change with the political winds, and probably can’t be predicted over time. Finally, and perhaps most important, how much effort are people and companies outside China willing to expend on deploying countermeasures? Most anti-censorship schemes require help from the outside: people to run anonymity services, web sites willing to permit encrypted access to all of their content, etc. (To give one example, I can’t read the New York Times using https. Either the Web site wasn’t set up to permit it or someone decided that it was too costly.) It’s easy for a government to block a few sites. But what if most Internet traffic were encrypted? As Arlo Guthrie sang in Alice’s Restaurant, “And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.” Is there a “movement”?

Making Freedom Inconvenient

Timothy B. Lee is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He blogs at Bottom-Up.

Censorship is not primarily about technology. Human beings are much smarter than computers, and they inevitably find ways to circumvent filters to get the content they want. Rather, the basis of effective censorship in China, like all government power, is the ability to punish people in “real life” when they do something online the government doesn’t like.

There is no purely technological solution because censorship is not primarily a technological problem.

The Chinese government knows that the “Great Firewall of China” won’t stop all attempts to access disfavored foreign Web sites. That is not its goal. The government simply seeks to make disfavored foreign Web sites inconvenient enough that most Chinese users will switch to homegrown alternatives that are under the government’s thumb. This allows the government to focus its human resources on the small minority of people who persist in circumventing the Great Firewall.

Google can do a lot of good by investing in improved circumvention technologies. A worldwide network of proxy servers helped dissidents in Iran communicate with the outside world in the weeks after last year’s disputed election. Google could certainly invest in the creation of a more extensive, robust, and user-friendly network of proxy servers.

Read more… Google can also help by embedding privacy-preserving and censorship- circumventing technologies more deeply into its existing products. Its recent decision to encrypt GMail access by default is a good example. Google might consider bundling circumvention software like Tor with its “Google Pack” of desktop software. The more ubiquitous such software becomes, the harder it will be for the Chinese government to distinguish innocuous uses of the technology from subversive ones. Still, there will never be a purely technological solution to censorship because censorship is not primarily a technological project. No software can protect a Chinese citizen from the knock on his door when he’s caught using circumvention software. Nor can any software allow him to publish criticisms of the government without fear of reprisal. Ultimately, defeating censorship is something that only the Chinese people themselves can accomplish by toppling their repressive regime. There is little that Google, or any American company, can do to directly shape the evolution of China’s political system. But Google’s withdrawal from China has important symbolic value. Google has become one of the world’s most prestigious brands, and for the last four years it has lent undeserved legitimacy to the government’s censorship efforts.

Not a War, a Stalemate

Mikko Hypponen, an authority on cybercrime who has tracked down several online criminals, is the chief research officer at F-Secure Corporation in Helsinki, Finland.

I don’t see how Google could win against China.

Google could be pushed out of China and the great firewall of China could block access to google.com and other global versions of Google.

For the Chinese end user, bypassing the great firewall isn’t hard if you know what you’re doing. However, the vast majority of the hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users would not know how to do it.

For the Chinese end user, bypassing the great firewall isn’t hard, but that’s not the issue.

I don’t think Google and China will end up in an all-out war. Here’s what I think will happen: Google or the U.S. State Department will make more accusations against China. China won’t respond at all or will respond with their usual confused statements. Google will lift some, but not all of the censorship they have in place on google.cn. The Chinese government won’t respond. Time will pass and this whole event will soon be forgotten.

Meanwhile, the targeted Trojan attacks carry on as they have for several years.

Choices Made for Business

Tyler Moore is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University.

Online censorship will keep working so long as repressive governments continue to carry it out. I say this not because I expect governments to maintain the upper hand technologically.

There are technical solutions to censorship, but they may never be scalable.

Computer scientists have long known that perfect censorship is practically impossible — holes in the great firewall can be found and filters remain incomplete. However, the goal of censorship is merely to control most, not all, of a population. Because the technologies available to fight censorship are unlikely to be adopted at a large scale, censorship will continue to be effective.

Technical solutions for defeating censorship were proposed and implemented a decade ago. These systems are still used today by tech-savvy activists. However, most targets of censorship — like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — can be successfully blocked because of architectural choices made for business reasons.

Read more… Running Web applications by storing and distributing content from central servers under the host’s control can make sense in a free society where censorship is not a significant threat. Centralized architectures are easier to design and more reliable in the absence of censorship. They also help firms control and profit from the data which has been collected from users — think of Google serving up ads based on search terms, or Facebook making friend suggestions based on the existing social network. Unfortunately, centralized architectures are easy targets of censorship, and from a business perspective, the advantages of the status quo outweigh the benefits of moving to a more robust design. Online surveillance is another tactic used by repressive regimes (spying on dissidents triggered Google’s threatened pull-out of China), and again, the available countermeasures aren’t widely used. Consider e-mail. Until recently, communications between users’ browsers and Gmail’s servers were not encrypted by default. This meant that, for instance, users checking their email at a WiFi hot-spot could have their communications eavesdropped. Even with encryption between user and server, surveillance remains possible. Because the e-mail itself is still sent unencrypted, a government could eavesdrop on the communication if the email is later intercepted (say, at an Internet service provider close to the government). A secure countermeasure to e-mail surveillance called PGP has been available for nearly 20 years. Using PGP, email is encrypted so that only the sender and recipient, not the email provider or any government, can read the message. So why doesn’t everyone use PGP? First, it requires both sender and receiver to use the service. Second, historically it has been difficult to use. Third, the business models of Web-based email providers conflict with PGP — if the email itself is encrypted, then Gmail can’t decide which ads to show you. In my view, the only long-term, scalable solution to Internet censorship and surveillance is political. To that end, technology and the open Internet are essential. Efforts to transparently document censorship, such as the Open Net Initiative and Herdict, might help shame repressive governments into change.

More Than a Tech Problem

Ron Deibert is the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects, and the vice president of policy for Psiphon Inc.

For years, innovative solutions to sidestep Internet filters have plagued Internet censors. Rebellious kids, hoping to sneak a peek around parental controls, have come up with some of the best of these ideas. Others are highly sophisticated open-source systems tended to by brainy PhD.’s and caffeine-fueled programmers.

We need a worldwide movement of citizens and policymakers to protect the Internet as an open global source of information.

Will Google now devote some of its formidable engineering resources to the problem of censorship circumvention? Will the people behind Google mail, Google wave and Google docs bring us something like Google Free? Surely a company as powerful as Google can invent an app that guarantees Internet freedom.

The problem is that circumventing Internet censorship is at least as much a social and political problem now as it is technological. And that’s because the nature of controls exercised in this domain are changing.

Read more… As documented by the OpenNet Initiative, cyberspace controls are evolving from technical filtering of Web requests to a variety of next-generation methods that are more subtle and offensive in nature. These methods can involve the imposition of stringent terms-of-use policies that stifle freedom of speech to informal pressures on Internet service providers to remove information or turn over user data they collect. More insidiously, they can include the outsourcing of computer network attacks on threatening sources of information or the use of cyberespionage systems of the type we found in Ghostnet, and which have plagued Google and other companies in recent weeks. These next-generation controls are effective precisely because they do not rely on a single technological filter that can be overcome by the latest app. They create a social and political climate of risk, intimidation and fear. Social and political controls like these require social and political solutions. Does this mean Google has no role to play in keeping the Internet free and open? Certainly it can make a contribution. Taking a principled stand and encouraging other companies to follow suit is a good start, as would be the donation of some of its engineering time to censorship circumvention. But what is required today goes beyond what a single company can achieve, even one as vast and influential as Google. We need a worldwide movement involving citizens and policymakers to protect the Internet as an open global source of information. The onus is on all of us.

China May Succeed

James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and directs its technology and public policy program.

A few years ago I worked on a C.I.A. study on how information technology would change the politics of nondemocratic countries. There is clearly a political effect from access to information and the ability of regime opponents to coordinate and plan, but one country in the world has spent billions on technology to defeat this: China. We concluded that for now, the Chinese government would be able to control the political effects of information technology.

As manufacturing moves to Asia, it will be easier for China to build controls into the technologies its citizens use.

China is in a good position to succeed. As manufacturing moves to Asia, it will be easier to build controls into the technologies China’s citizens use. China wants its own IT industry and has been investing for decades in the people and plants it will need to get one. The policy has two goals: expanding the ability to control IT and ending the dependence on Western technology.

Read more… It is important to use the right measure of success. Success for Beijing is blocking any serious opposition, not foreign content. So far, China has stayed ahead. It’s a delicate dance — China wants openness for access to Western technology (and they build on openness with aggressive cyberespionage), but this same openness brings political risk. Information technology will bring political change to China, but the process will be neither quick nor easy. One caveat: the study’s most interesting conclusion was that IT and information had a democratizing effect if by democratization we mean broader participation in a political process rather than an endorsement of Western political values. As we’ve seen with Jihadi use of the Internet, there are many outcomes that access to information and IT can bring and not all of them are favorable. China’s “netizens” have gained some influence, and this influence will grow, but the direction it could take is uncertain. Getting a more democratic China may have more to do with how well the U.S. engages China and how persuasive our example and our rhetoric will be in pointing toward an open society rather than finding a few technological fixes to breach the great firewall.

The Dictator’s Dilemma

Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, England, and author of The Snooping Dragon, as well as the standard textbook Security Engineering.

Governments have always tried to control information, but the game is changing fast. Globalization is shifting the real power from national post offices, press censors and police forces to private companies. Overall, that’s a good thing; it’s easier to set up a new company than a new country.

Filtering is becoming ever harder, and blocking entire sites now has serious side effects.

It’s technically possible to filter the Internet but it’s getting ever harder in practice because of the growing volume and complexity of traffic, and because of the growing use of encryption. And the

consolidation of services in large “Web 2.0″ firms like Google, Microsoft and Facebook poses a new dilemma for dictators.

If you want to block some content on YouTube, the only practical ways to do that may be to get YouTube to cooperate, or to block the whole site: you “block it all, or not at all.” But blocking it all can have serious side effects. If you block all of YouTube (as Thailand and Pakistan have tried), your schools will suffer and your population, deprived of entertainment, might get restive.