Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) : Counters to Chinese Checkers

By Murray Hiebert/WASHINGTON
Issue cover-dated November 07, 2002

IF SOME LAWMAKERS in the United States get their way, freedom-promoting computer hackers may soon receive a bucketful of money to battle China's Internet-censoring police.

Christopher Cox, a Republican from California, introduced legislation in early October that would create an Office of Global Internet Freedom and spend $100 million over two years to fund efforts to develop censorship-busting technology. China would be the main focus in Asia, but Vietnam, Burma, Laos and North Korea would also be targets.

Cox and his co-sponsors trumpet in their draft bill that "the Internet stands to become the most powerful engine for democratization and free exchange of ideas ever invented."

The congressman's goals are lauded by human-rights activists, champions of a free Internet and opponents of China's communist leadership, but many computer experts and China specialists have reservations about whether throwing so much money at the problem will work. "I'm sceptical that any of the measures can be so effective that they can't be counteracted" by Chinese authorities, says a senior official of the U.S. administration.

Analysts say the software currently being developed may help Chinese users circumvent official blocks. But they add that their activities may still be detectable by the authorities, leaving these users less protected than they believe and vulnerable to reprisals, including imprisonment.

Chinese officials have long been torn about whether to view the Internet as an engine to boost economic growth or as a subversive threat that could undermine the ruling Communist Party. According to a recent study by the Rand Corp. think-tank, China has some 46 million Internet users, while at least 25 people have been arrested in the past two years for on-line activities. And after a deadly fire in an Internet café in Beijing earlier this year, the authorities closed thousands of Internet cafés and demanded that those allowed to reopen install surveillance and firewall software to block pornographic and "subversive" Web sites.

The Communist Party has always seen the media's primary role as rallying public support for the party and its policies. So when the Internet came along, it was no surprise that the party wanted to control it, too, even as it recognized the Net's economic and educational benefits. The party's biggest concern is that the Internet could be used by foreign or indigenous organizations, such as the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, to organize opposition to communist rule. It also worries that the Internet could be used to disseminate state secrets.

In an apparent bid to control users, China in late August blocked access to the Google Internet search engine for a brief period, diverting users to local Chinese search engines instead. In recent weeks, Beijing has shifted tactics again, opening up some previously blocked Web sites, but making it impossible for users to open documents on those sites that relate to China.

But even without U.S. government funding, hackers have begun developing programs to defeat Internet censorship in China. The new programs capitalize on the peer-to-peer architecture exploited earlier by Napster for sharing music files, but they've achieved mixed results.

Triangle Boy, a pilot project introduced in April 2001 by the California-based SafeWeb, allows users to access the World Wide Web through an encrypted channel. Safeweb, which received $250,000 from a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency venture capital fund to develop the software, was paid almost $100,000 earlier this year by the Voice of America to help Chinese listeners access the radio station's blocked Web site.

But one of the biggest problems facing Triangle Boy had been communicating Internet Portal addresses to users without Chinese authorities finding them and blocking the sites. It suspended operations earlier this year.

A second program, Peekabooty, is being developed and funded by Canadian programmer Paul Baranowski. When Chinese using this software confront a blocked Internet site, they inform a network of computers running Peekabooty that then finds the requested information and returns it to the original computer in encrypted form.

A third program, Dynaweb, was launched in North Carolina in March by a group of Chinese-American engineers keen to open up the Internet to users in China. Dynaweb, which helps Chinese users access blocked Internet sites and download banned documents, is difficult for Beijing to attack because it regularly changes its numerical Internet Portal address, which the government uses to identify sites. Company spokesman Bill Dong says they would use any money provided by Cox's legislation to "expand our server, make our performance better and respond to any technology China develops to stop us."

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"Definitely, some money will help" these groups, says Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based organization that promotes the rights of Internet users worldwide. But Tien is concerned that the software developed so far has not done enough to protect the identity of the users from China's Internet police.

"China is now able to gather information about people who use the [new] software," agrees James Mulvenon, co-author of a Rand study of the Internet in China. "Before throwing good money after bad, there needs to be a careful examination of the [software] designs," the China specialist says about the possible funding from Congress.

Mulvenon questions whether Internet use will promote the profound political changes in China that Cox and his colleagues hope for. In the short term, he doubts that the Internet will lead to profound shifts in political power. "But in the long term, it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which the spread of information technology . . . contributes to gradual pluralization of the system," he says.

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