Good idea!
This could also be a job for P2P; lots of people would love to
devote their spare cycles, bandwidth, and unblocked IP addresses
to giving the Chinese unfettered net access.
In a sense, this is what the "peek-a-booty" project does:
http://www.peek-a-booty.org
But let's play out the next few moves:
Good Guys: Google enables SSL access
Bad Guys: Chinese government again blocks all access to Google domains
Good Guys: Set up Google proxies on ever-changing set of hosts (peek-a-booty)
Bad Guys: Ban SSL (or any unlicensed opaque traffic) at the national firewall
Good Guys: Hide Google traffic inside other innocuous-looking activity
Bad Guys: Require nationwide installation of client-side NetNannyish
software
Good Guys: Offer software which disables/spoofs monitoring software
Bad Guys: Imprison and harvest organs from people found using
monitoring-disabling-software
...and on and on.
The best we can hope is that technological cleverness, by raising the
costs of oppression or by provoking intolerable oppression, brings
social liberalization sooner rather than later.
- Gordon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rohit Khare" <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
To: <fork@spamassassin.taint.org>
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:44 PM
Subject: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google?
[a cheeky letter to the editors of the Economist follows, along with the
article I was commenting on... Rohit]
In your article about Chinese attempts to censor Google last week ("The
Search Goes On", Sept. 19th), the followup correctly noted that the most
subversive aspect of Google's service is not its card catalog, which
merely points surfers in the right direction, but the entire library. By
maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire World Wide Web,
if you can get to Google's cache, you can read anything you'd like.
The techniques Chinese Internet Service Providers are using to enforce
these rules, however, all depend on the fact that traffic to and from
Google, or indeed almost all public websites, is unencrypted. Almost all
Web browsers, however, include support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like. Upgrading to
SSL makes it effectively impossible for a 'man-in-the-middle' to meddle;
censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in
China. The only choice left is to either ban the entire site (range of
IP addresses), but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in
the article.
Of course, the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic
costs real money. If the United States is so concerned about the free
flow of information, why shouldn't the Broadcasting Board of Governors
sponsor an encrypted interface to Google, or for that matter, the rest
of the Web?
To date, public diplomacy efforts have focused on public-sector
programming for the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, and the like. Just
imagine if the US government got into the business of subsidizing secure
access to private-sector media instead. Nothing illustrates the freedom
of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself -- and most
of it is already salted away at Google and the Internet Archive project.
On second thought, I can hardly imagine this Administration *promoting*
the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights. Never mind...
Best,
Rohit Khare
===========================================================
The search goes on
China backtracks on banning Google—up to a point
Sep 19th 2002 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine,
is gougou, meaning “doggy”. For the country's fast-growing population of
Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving
an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked
access to Google from Internet service providers in China—apparently
because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to
forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been
restored.
An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More
sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to
use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government.
Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by
Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for
Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites.
After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users
posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move.
Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet
providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site
to far less powerful search engines in China.
Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm,
BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to
censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking
individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be
filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key
words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this
week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on
Google for Falun Gong—a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China—
usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search
also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.