Janet Haven

Professor Ron Deibert, director of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, alerted me a few weeks ago to a brief and helpful resource now on their website: an FAQ on Psiphon, the tool for circumventing internet censorship that Citizen Lab is developing. Psiphon works a bit differently than other circumvention tools now available, relying on social networks, or, as the developers at Citizen Lab call them, "networks of trust":

Who will use Psiphon?

Psiphon operates through networks of trust. There are Psiphon providers, who install and run the server in an uncensored country and Psiphon users who login and access the server from a country that censors the Internet.

How does Psiphon work?

Psiphon acts as a "web proxy" for authenticated users, retrieving requested web pages and displaying them in a user's browser. Psiphon uses a secure, encrypted connection to receive web requests from the Psiphon user to the Psiphon provider who then transports the results back to the Psiphon user. There is no connection between the Psiphon user and the requested website, as Psiphon transparently proxies the request through the Psiphon provider's computer allowing the Psiphon user to browse blocked websites seamlessly.

Both the FAQ -- which makes a complicated idea very accessible to the non-technical end-user -- and the nearness of Psiphon's release are very good news for the growing number of countries where online censorship is not just a threat, but a reality.

The bad news is that censorship circumvention remains a game of cat and mouse, a point highlighted today in a press release from Reporters Without Borders. The report they issued focused on the increased control and filtering internet users are experiencing in China, particularly in terms of access to Google; for China internet watchers, this isn't entirely unexpected. Particularly alarming, though, were the final three paragraphs of the release:

At the same time, the authorities have largely managed to neutralise software designed to sidestep censorship since 24 May. Such software as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate and Garden Networks is normally used by about 100,000 people in China to gain access to news and information that is blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of the worldwide web.

Bill Xia, the US-based exile who created Dynapass, said the jamming of these programmes had reached an unprecedented level and he was convinced the authorities were deploying considerable hardware and software resources to achieve it.

Software engineers based abroad have been trying to update these programmes on the basis of information they have received from Internet users inside China. A new version of Dynapass was released a few days ago, but its effectiveness is still extremely limited.

This is bad news, although a tool like Psiphon may be able to step effectively into the breech, at least for a period of time.