Don’t worry about the mandatory filter. You can get around it. Smarty-pants tech blogs love pointing this out. But it’s not that simple.

“The good news is that those not wanting the government to filter their feed can work around any proposed filter so easily that one wonders why the government is even bothering”, writes Anthony Caruna in Hydrapinion.

“Any motivated user will be able to get around it, it will be quite easy, so who is this being targeted at?” asked Electronic Frontiers Australia vice chair Colin Jacobs.

They are right, of course. Getting around the filter makes the Government’s attempt look silly. There are loads of ways to circumvent Internet control – and you’ll get a list below. But there are are few problems with the assumption that these tools will render state control irrelevant. Biggest of all is the fact that – as if! – Australians aren’t going to re-route their entire internet experience through a proxy, in the rare likelihood they’ll stumble across uncensored RC content they don’t want to see anyway. Besides, not every one is technologically proficient, or motivated enough, to use proxy servers (there’s evidence of this in China).

Another problem is the live question of whether there will be end-user penalties if you do want to get around the filter. If you’re dodging the filter to see RC content, will the police come knocking if you’ve found access to it? What are the privacy implications of that? Will your ISP report you if they find out?

The extra steps involved in getting around net censorship are annoying, to say the least, and are only needed in the most oppressive Internet regimes that filter political content, like China. Your net slows. Graphics and video are limited. Naturally, getting around the filter will become a major story if it gets up and running (like when a 16 year old kid spent half an hour hacking and getting around the $116 million anti-porn initiative based on PC-based filters in 2006). And it will definitely show the absurdity of the filter.

But for those interested in the censorship debate, getting around the net doesn’t solve the problem of the filter in the first place. It’s still censorship. And once in place, it will have the full weight of the law behind it if you do anything wrong.

Getting Around The Filter

When I lived in Beijing, I was kicked off the internet a few times. In my mind, a giant police squad in a space-age control room was monitoring every tit and ball. In reality, the limited dynamic filtering in China may have flagged some key words (like Tiananmen, or Tibet) and traced my IP. My individual IP was blocked sometimes for hours, even up to a day. I started routing most of my risky browsing through a proxy server, which in China is itself considered a crime.

How does it work? In a great post yesterday by Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkley lays down the basics of circumvention:

Circumvention systems share a basic mode of operation – they act as proxies to let you retrieve blocked content. A user is blocked from accessing a website by her ISP or that ISP’s ISP. She wants to read a page from Human Rights Watch’s webserver, which is accessible at IP address 70.32.76.212. But that IP address is on a national blacklist, and she’s prevented from receiving any content from it. So she points her browser to a proxy server at another address – say 123.45.67.89 – and asks a program on that server to retrieve a page from the HRW server. Assuming that 123.45.67.89 isn’t on the national blacklist, she should be able to receive the HRW page via the proxy. During the transaction, the proxy is acting like an internet service provider.

(picture from Security In A Box: Tools and Tactics For Your Digital Security)

I used a service called Anonymouse in Beijing. But there are plenty of others. Reporters Without Borders publishes a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. I’ve combined their suggestions with those from a fantastic chapter in Security In A Box: Tools and Tactics For Your Digital Security, for this list. Feel free to add you favourite by commenting below.

(Also check out the brilliant Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship (PDF 1.5mb) from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto for even more suggestions).

Most Popular

Probably the most popular circumvention tool is a piece of software called Tor (China head Rebecca Mackinnon calls it “the tool of choice for circumventing Internet censorship in places like China these days”). It will provide anonymity as well as circumvention. Each time you connect to the Tor network, you select a random path through three secure Tor proxies. For cyber-dissidents, it offers sustained identity protection, and despite some online fearing for its flaws, a Uni of Colorado research team has declared it: “the most secure and usable privacy enhancing system available” (also via Mackinnon).

Databases of Proxy Servers

Public Proxy Servers (http://publicproxyservers.com) – a comprehensive live of anonymous and non-anonymous proxies, plus figures on their reliabilty and rating.
Samair (http://www.samair.ru/proxy/) – only anonymous proxies.
Rosinstrument proxy database (http://tools.rosinstrument.com/proxy/) – searchable
Anti Proxy (http://www.antiproxy.com/)
Multi Proxy (http://www.multiproxy.org/)

Public, Web-based circumvention

Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com/)
Unipeak (http://www.unipeak.com/)
Anonymouse (http://www.anonymouse.ws/)
Proxyweb (http://www.proxyweb.net/)
Guardster (http://www.guardster.com/)
Webwarper (http://www.webwarper.net/)
Proximal (http://www.proximal.com/)
The Cloak (http://www.the-cloak.com/)
Psiphon2 (http://www.psiphon.ca/) is a private, anonymous webproxy servers system.

Other software downloads:

Sesawe Hotspot Shield (https://sesawe.net/Anchor-Free-Hotspot-Shield.html) is a public, secure, non-web-based, freeware circumvention proxy.
Your-Freedom (http://www.your-freedom.net/) is a private, secure, non-web-based circumvention proxy.

Problems with proxies

There are a few problems with proxies. Like any company, a proxy business is subject to the jurisdiction it operates under, and subject to investigation like any other. Rebecca Mackinnon writes a lengthy piece about the funding for some of these companies, especially tools supplied for the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC).  She writes that GIFC is funded by Falun Gong affiliates and the US government. Hal Roberts from The Berkman Center for Internet and Society also raises the possibility that your proxy service might sell you out: “Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users” (While this has later been denied by the specific companies involved, it makes the issue about trust, and how much you know about the service you’re using. These services aren’t the cure-all solution to filtering).

It’s also a game of cat and mouse. According to the Security in a Box site: “the government agency in charge of Internet censorship in your country (or the company that provides updates for its filtering software) might eventually learn that this ‘unknown computer’ is really a circumvention proxy. If that happens, its IP address may itself be added to the blacklist, and it will no longer work”. Bang, there goes your free-ride.

In China, you’d expect users of the net to regularly use proxies. But they don’t. Evidence shows that there is little knowledge of them, or a wide acceptance of net restrictions. 95% of total traffic is to domestic Chinese content – so to begin with Chinese people aren’t looking very far for content. So it shouldn’t be surprising that according to a 2000 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) survey of Internet use in five Chinese cities, 10 percent of users surveyed admitted to regularly using, and 25 percent to occasionally using, proxy servers to circumvent censorship (via Human Rights Watch PDF 4.5mb). My experience was that those around me only used it when they really had to. Most Chinese just viewed the major domestic websites in China, and didn’t want their net slowed by a proxy. Certainly, I began accepting the limitations of riding in the Chinese internet ‘car’ — there’s just less to see, and less expression, harder to use… I better come to terms with it. While China is very different, it would be interesting to see whether the average Australian net user would want to opt-out of the filter by regularly using proxies. I seriously doubt it.

Another significant problem is that proxies themselves don’t always offer unfettered access (just when you thought you could get away with it!) — because the bandwidth required to run them (like mini-ISPs) is expensive. As Zuckerman explains in his most recent post:

Proxy operators have dealt with this question by putting constraints on the use of their tools. Some proxy operators block access to YouTube because it’s such a bandwidth hog. Others block access to pornography, both because it uses bandwidth and to protect the sensibilities of their sponsors. Others constrain who can use their tools, limiting access to the tools to people coming from Iranian or Chinese IPs, trying to reduce bandwidth use by American high school kids who’ve got YouTube blocked by their school.

The other major concern is if the Government decides to enforce penalties for people using tools to get around the filter. Using proxies may in fact flag you to authorities. Like using a torch in a dark room to see things, it’s easier for others to see you and grab you. It’s illegal in China to use proxies, so you’re facing further risk there. In Australia, it is yet to be seen whether circumventing the internet filter will attract penalties.

But there is some precedent for some circumvention tools being illegal. Once law, the filter could be vulnerable to what’s called ’scope creep’, explains David Vaile from UNSW: “As powerful stakeholders lobby globally for a copyright filter, the potential for Australia’s ISP-level filtering project to extend to this area is cause for concern”. In the states, there is already legislation as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes it illegal to use circumvention technology to reverse-engineer rights controls on, say, your CD collection. Because of the free trade agreement with the US, Australia has taken on these regulations too. Writes the digihub blog of the SMH, ‘It’s now illegal to bypass Digital Rights Management technologies, which means TV broadcasters, record companies and movie houses are entitled to block any legal right you might have to make copies, and it’s illegal for you to bypass this.’ The DMCA prohibits even the possession of a circumvention device. So if scope creep happens, should we watch out when using circumvention software to get around the net filter?

And finally, circumventing censorship through proxies just gives you access to stuff overseas. Take down notices in Australia would still be issued – as they always have been – for any prohibited content hosted within Australia.

In the end, a government filter could just turn some Australians into fey cyber-dissidents by proxy. But I doubt many, if any, would regularly try to circumvent the internet in this way. We’re more likely to cop it on the chin.

Proxies do make the filter look silly, but they still leave the deeper gnawing question of the filter completely in tact.

[picture credit: via Flickr creative commons user atopeconlatxabaleria]