CHINA
FEBRUARY 1925, 2015 | A5
www.TheEpochTimes.com/China
KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A map showing user activity from Facebook users around the world. China, where Facebook is blocked, shows little activity.
Breaching the Chinese Firewall
Freegate delivers Internet freedom to the Chinese people
Great Firewall continued from A1
The Chinese authorities don’t like
people like Li Huanjun.
Closed internet garden
In its bid to make China’s Internet a walled garden, the regime
has forced citizens to use their
real names when surfi ng the
Web, launched a focused crackdown on virtual private networks, and pursued with a vengeance anyone inside China with
the temerity to buck Beijing’s
policies.
The only problem is that one
crack in the wall, which China’s Internet authorities just
can’t seem to patch over: the
anti-circumvention technologies developed by a small group
of Chinese-American tech entrepreneurs, with names like Freegate and Ultrasurf.
“These companies represent
the great David and Goliath story
of my lifetime,” said Michael
Horowitz, a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who
has taken a strong interest in the
fate of the two anti-censorship
outfits.
“A little bit of money has thus
far beat billions of dollars and
thousands of the ablest people China can bring into the
mix. This is a matter of survival
for China – and they throw
everything at it.”
Freegate and Ultrasurf each
employ their own anonymisation protocols to allow users
in China to access the Internet
without impediment – one simply downloads a small program,
and the free Internet presents
itself.
Data anonymisation is the process of destroying tracks, or the
electronic trail, on the data that
would lead an eavesdropper to its
origins. An electronic trail is the
information that is left behind
when someone sends data over
a network.
The applications present a
problem for the authorities
because the more aggressively
they try to shut them down, the
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
greater they risk closing off the
Internet entirely – which they
want to avoid.
Freedom online has become
an especially precious commodity, given China’s recent all out
attempts to effectively create its
own intranet.
A raft of restrictions
The Chinese Communist Party
has always sought to control the
Internet and block applications
like Tor (which it has) and Freegate (which it can’t) – but analysts agree that in the last few
months, these efforts have grown
in urgency.
The Party in early 2014 publicly revived its “leading group on
Internet security and informatisation”, which handles the commanding heights of cyberpolicy.
The overall goal of this group is
to boost China’s indigenous technology industry and bring closer
co-operation among the various
departments on Chinese Internet
policies and controls.
Most recently, their attention
has shifted to blocking a host
of virtual private networks, or
VPNs, widely used by expats
and other technically inclined
users inside China. Such VPNs,
which create an encrypted tunnel from the client computer to a
server outside China and access
the Internet through that server,
typically cost around $10 ($A13)
a month. They allow users to visit
Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, and
other sites blocked in China,
delivering to the reader news and
perspectives unavailable on the
official Internet.
Businesses in China often rely
on VPNs for their basic operational needs – like syncing sales
data through Google services,
or similar uses. VPN providers like Astrill, Golden Frog and
StrongVPN, all acknowledged in
recent statements that their services appeared to have been targeted. Some were able to resume
service later, while others suffer
intermittent outages.
Gmail was completely blocked
late last year, after other Google
services were also blocked in
about June of last year. Moreover, Chinese cyberforces appear
to have begun using so-called
man-in-the-middle attacks on
users who try to access Yahoo,
Google, Microsoft and Apple services in China – the attack seeks
to intercept and spy on traffic
between the user and the service.
Western tech firms in China
are also being
forced to submit to “security” screenings
of their products, and even
hand over their
source codes.
This demand for
“secure and controllable” technology triggered
the American
Cha mber of
Commerce in
China, and other
groups, to write
a letter to Secretary of State John
Kerry asking for
help.
continues his torrid campaign
of eliminating opponents – tens
of thousands have been investigated – and seizing control over
the Party apparatus.
Police state
The new measures restricting the
Internet, added onto an already
formidable apparatus of censorship and surveillance, all add up
to a potent combination. However, perhaps the
greatest threat
the regime poses
to tools like Freegate is not technical, but political,
said Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting fellow at the
Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, and
a cybersecurity
consultant.
“Their most
effective tool is
to use the force of
law to simply create a police state,
and the punishment for using
Tightening
Chinese authoria VPN is a bullet between the
ties rarely explain
Cecilia Lan,
why they do the
eyes,” Mr Rosendemocracy activist
things they do –
zweig said.
“Throughthough it’s clear
that these Interout history the
net restrictions have been years authoritarian regimes have made
in the making, and are being their bones not so much out of
rolled out now during a time of their technological prowess, but
broader ideological and political the pervasiveness of their surtightening in China.
veillance. No one is going to use
In newly vigorous propaganda the newest VPN if they’re afraid
campaigns, “Western” and lib- someone is going to rat them out
eral ideas have been vilified as and they’ll wind up in the gulag.”
threats to China, and individu“There’s no secret technologials with liberal sympathies have cal sauce in what China’s doing,”
been put under tremendous pres- Mr Rosenzweig said. “It’s just a
sure to support the Communist host of techniques that, layered
Party, with some prominent aca- upon each other, become increasdemics, bloggers and journalists ingly effective at shutting down
being jailed.
the freedom of information in
Economic growth has slowed, the network.”
“They’ve devoted a lot more
putting pressure on the regime,
which in any case is going resources than most people,
through a dramatic transforma- and they’re probably leading in
tion. Xi Jinping, the Party leader, deployment and implementa-
When China
shut down VPNs,
Freegate stood
out because it
never gave up.
Whenever the
Communist
Party upgraded
the wall, Freegate
upgraded itself
too.
tion,” he said.
Still working
For all those resources, Freegate
and Ultrasurf are still kicking,
despite intensive efforts by Chinese authorities to track down
and shut off their networks of
late.
“We still serve roughly hundreds of thousands every
day,” said Bill Xia, president of
Dynamic Internet Technology,
which runs Freegate, in a telephone interview.
He said that many users are
still having difficulty accessing
Freegate, depending on where in
China they are, and that despite
the harsh measures against other
VPNs, Freegate hasn’t seen much
of a commensurate boost in traffic because of China’s blocking
mechanisms. “We’re still in the
middle of it, so we don’t want to
give out any details,” Xia said.
Cecilia Lan, a democracy activist who was part of a group that
pushed for rule of law based on
China’s 1947 constitution, and
who left China late last year,
said: “Freegate was the best I
ever tried.” It wasn’t the only
mechanism, she said – sometimes more ideal were other
VPNs or GoAgent. “But when
China shut down VPNs, Freegate
stood out because it never gave
up. Whenever the Communist
Party upgraded the wall, Freegate upgraded itself too.”
Lan is now based in Washington, DC.
She referred to the Chinese
phrase “Virtue is 1 foot tall, the
devil 10 feet,” but said in the case
of Freegate and the Communist
Party, “The devil is 1 foot tall, and
virtue 10 feet!”
“It’s a good name, too,” Lan
said. “Very simple and direct.
‘The Gate to Freedom’.”
Freedom agenda
Mr Horowitz is keenly aware of
the challenges faced by Freegate
and its ilk.
On the one hand, “the Chinese
firewall effectively has an unlimited budget – it’s hard to think of
a single government enterprise in
either a dictatorship or democracy where there’s an unlimited
budget, and the firewall people
have it.”
He added: “And yet there’s
these two groups operating on
a shoestring.”
Part of the lapse there is due
to the paucity of funding that
the two companies get, especially from the US Government,
which has shown little appetite
for large-scale support. Freegate is mostly funded privately,
which limits its impact – enough
to keep the operations going, but
“not enough to allow them to
have a critical mass effect,” said
Mr Horowitz.
If they were able to scale up
their operations, getting millions
or tens of millions of IP addresses
on which to operate their platforms, “it wouldn’t even be worth
trying” to shut them down, Mr
Horowitz said.
He and others hope that US
policymakers will soon see the
value of Freegate and similar
soft ware, and make available
more funding.
Even now when demand spikes,
Freegate has to ration access to
its servers.
This, though, has an upside:
Freegate’s efforts under pressure from China and with little
money have made them more
resilient than ever. “It’s in adversity that one learns,” Mr Horowitz said. When US policymakers come around to the idea of
genuinely supporting the services, Mr Horowitz said: “It will
be infinitely harder for China to
do anything.”
America ought to take an
interest in the freedom of China’s Internet for the same reason it cared about the free flow
of information into Soviet Russia,
Mr Rosenzweig said. “Authoritarian regimes maintain their
power by restricting the access of
their citizens to information that
would upset the status quo. I get
why they want that – but fundamentally, America’s interests are
not aligned with theirs.”
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