A FEW months ago, Internet users in China discovered they could no longer access the Google search engine. All requests to view the Web page were returned 鈥淓rror 403 鈥� Forbidden鈥�. A technical glitch? Hell, no. The block was deliberate, the latest of many moves by Chinese authorities to keep their citizens away from politically sensitive information on the Internet.
Access to Google has apparently been reinstated in China, but the reality of a dictatorship shutting down such a powerful international search engine jolted Net users around the globe out of their collective slumber over censorship.
China isn鈥檛 the only offender. The Syrian government can filter every email account in the country because it controls the only Internet service provider; Saudi authorities appear to filter all public Web requests and email traffic.
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Lately, China鈥檚 censors seem to have been getting more sophisticated. Disruptive attacks 鈥� usually in the form of viruses 鈥� have been launched against dissident groups. China鈥檚 Public Security Bureaus, which police the Internet, deny all charges but were recently accused by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile of tampering with one of the Dalai Lama鈥檚 networks.
Four years ago such problems prompted me to form an international programming group to fight Internet censorship. Now politicians in Washington DC want to join the fight. Last month, two Congressmen proposed a bill to create a federal Office of Global Internet Freedom. With $60 million over two years, it would work within the government鈥檚 International Broadcasting Bureau, home of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
A great move, if handled correctly. But does Congress really know what it鈥檚 getting into? The signs are not good. For example, the policy report introducing the Office of Global Internet Freedom trumpets a tool called Triangle Boy. Financed by the CIA and developed by SafeWeb, a maker of networking hardware in Emeryville, California, Triangle Boy became popular in China and throughout the Middle East as a means of 鈥渆vading鈥� Web censorship. Triangle Boy is supposed to allow you to side-step government firewalls by routing all browsing through a system of 鈥減roxy鈥� servers. In reality, many states have exploited the software to monitor the very people who believed they could rely on it to protect their anonymity.
Also mentioned in the same policy report is an anti-censorship software tool called Peekabooty. While Triangle Boy relies heavily on central 鈥渕othership鈥� servers, Peekabooty was envisioned as a distributed, peer-to-peer proxying service. As the person responsible for naming and inventing Peekabooty with two other hackers, I鈥檓 in a fairly good position to say that this dog has fleas too. The current iteration of Peekabooty being touted around Washington is based on a flawed design we abandoned three years ago.
If Congress wants to save the Internet, it had better learn the difference between half-baked technologies and sound solutions. It had also better steel itself for a fight in its own backyard. Signing up to the principle of Internet freedom is easy. The awkward part comes when you ask how censorious countries like China are able to build their firewalls and filtering systems. Answer: with Western technology.
Anyone who wants to censor the Internet can simply buy 鈥渃ensorware鈥� from American corporations like Cisco and Websense. The first makes networking routers and firewalls, the second, desktop Web filtering software. In recent years, these and similar companies have made a killing in places like China and Saudi Arabia. 鈥淓very [Chinese] firewall has Cisco routers,鈥� one anonymous senior Chinese engineer told an Australian newspaper in August.
Such companies are unlikely to take kindly to being told what they can and cannot sell to such censorious regimes. Yet, logically, that is where an assault on Internet political censorship might lead. Is Congress really ready to go head-to-head with one of the most powerful industries in the US?
And is Congress ready to write legislation that doesn鈥檛 make it look like an ass? 鈥淣othing in this Act,鈥� the new bill says, 鈥渟hall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with law enforcement aims.鈥�
But Saudi courts treat the words moral and political as synonyms, and for the Chinese, public morality is a primary reason for Net censorship. So this wording amounts to a loophole big enough to sabotage the entire initiative.
Last spring I wrote an article published to coincide with the US-China Commission hearings on China and the Internet. It ended with an appeal for liberal democracies to fund Internet anti-censorship programmes. I know for a fact that a lot of Congressional staffers read that article. It would have been so much better if their bosses had read it too.