Hacking through the walls of China

TORONTO — More than fifteen years after the Berlin Wall was shattered with hammers and bulldozers, a Canadian-designed computer program is preparing to break through what activists call the great firewall of China.

The program, in the late stages of development in a University of Toronto office, is designed to help those trapped behind the blocking and filtering systems set up by restrictive governments. If successful, it will equip volunteers in more open countries to help those on the other side of digital barriers, allowing a free flow of information and news into and out of even the most closed societies.

The program is part of a quiet war over freedom of information. Even as countries considered repressive, such as China, North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia, pour money into stopping the free exchange of data, small groups of activists keep looking for ways around the technological barriers.

At the University of Toronto, in the small basement office of Citizen Lab, researchers are getting ready for the release of Psiphon, the latest weapon in the fight.

"I was always interested in the idea of using computers for social and political change," said Nart Villeneuve, who has been dabbling with the project for about two years. "It was a matter of creating a program for really non-technical people that was easy and effective."

Psiphon is designed to eliminate a drawback of anti-filter programs: incriminating the users behind the firewall. If found by authorities, that anti-filter software can lead to coercive interrogation, a bid to uncover the suspect's Internet travel secrets using a tactic known to insiders as "rubber-hose cryptoanalysis."

Mr. Villeneuve built a system that won't leave dangerous footprints on computers. In simple terms, it works by giving monitored computer users a way to send an encrypted request for information to a computer located in a secure country. That computer finds the information and sends it back, also encrypted.

An elegant wrinkle is that the data will enter users' machines through computer port 443. Relied on for the secure transfer of data, this port is the one through whichreams of financial data stream constantly around the world.

"Unless a country wanted to cut off all connections for any financial transactions they wouldn't be able to cut off these transmissions," said Professor Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab.

A drawback to Psiphon is that the person behind the firewall has to be given a user name and password by the person offering up the computer. With this kind of setup, Mr. Villeneuve said, activists may end up working with specific dissidents and people in repressive countries may rely on relatives abroad to help them get connected. Canadians, with ties to every country in the world, are in a particularly good position to use such a system.

Although this reduces the program's reach, a relationship-based system could also minimize improper use. People who know the owner of their proxy computer are less likely to abuse their system, the logic goes.

"The big novel thing here is that you have a one-to-one connection," said Danny O'Brien, activism co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group. "That's a great innovation, because so many people have computers that are always on, and this lets you deal with someone you can trust."

If the remote user begins to view illegal material, their access can be limited in several ways, such as allowing access to text only. In extreme cases, Mr. Villeneuve said, people found with evidence of illegal activity on their computer would be able to prove through forensic analysis that it had been done by the remote user.

The team at Citizen Lab is now racing to put the final touches on the program in time for its public debut at the international congress of the free-speech group PEN in May. Billed as a uniquely Canadian approach to "hactivism," the first generation of Psiphon will then be made publicly available.

Its release is set to come against a backdrop of ever-diminishing free access to the Internet. Just last month the popular search engine Google agreed to self-censor, restricting access to certain content and websites in order to gain access to the Chinese market.

Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, an international NGO, said the country has managed to create "a culture of fear and self-censorship." They are helped, she added, by Western countries willing to sell Internet-monitoring equipment to Beijing and bend to its terms.

Mr. O'Brien noted that public knowledge of monitoring can have as major an effect as the surveillance itself.

"You don't need to arrest every dissident and you don't need to take down every website. You just need to give the impression that you're watching," he said. "Merely establishing that you are being watched has a great effect on freedom of expression."

Activist groups around the world work to shine a spotlight on such repression, hoping that publicity and pressure will bring about change.

Although Psiphon is a purely Citizen Lab project, Prof. Deibert's team is also part of the Open Net Initiative. It's a partnership that includes Harvard and Cambridge universities and tries to document the extent of state interference on the Internet.

In Prof. Deibert's words, they try "to turn the tables on the watchers, to watch the watchers."