Neighbourhood Watch
How cyberactivists keep the web’s traffic moving
BY Terence Dick
Photography by Reuters/Kimberly White
This past February, Internet brokers Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and Cisco were called before the Committee on International Relations of the US House of Representatives and taken to task for aiding and abetting human rights violations (particularly around privacy and freedom of speech) in their ever growing business dealings with China. The upstart capitalists tried to garner sympathy by arguing that the mammoth market in China is impossible to ignore and, in a fit of playground rhetoric, if they didn’t make the deals, someone else would. Google’s defense, an attempt to adhere to their company mantra (“Don’t be evil”) while at the same time pleasing stockholders, was to revise their two-part mandate—with its fundamental commitments to its users’ interests and the ongoing expansion of access to information on the internet—to include a third dedication: “Be responsive to local conditions” (googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in-china.html). Google admittedly demonstrates a ballsy kind of ball-playing with the newly established Google.cn actually registering instances of censorship in its search results, but its professed cultural sensitivity to the particular needs of China smacks of money hunger overwhelming grassroots ethics. Whose local interests is it really serving other than the Chinese police and government? The real “locals,” be they full-fledged dissidents or merely concerned citizens who question their government, are left high and dry.
However—and this is something you’d think Google would understand (admittedly it does, but only in a roundabout way with the whole “internet service as Trojan Horse for freedom” argument)—there is no such thing as a local condition when you’re talking about the internet. Or more accurately, there are only local conditions on the internet, no matter where on the planet you find yourself. That’s why a cadre of neighbourly libertarians from parts all over can so easily step up and help domestic Chinese access and exchange whatever information they so desire. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Haven Project have set up an anonymous communications system called Tor that routes internet activity through a network of participating computers to evade surveillance and data gathering. Anti-censorship site Peacefire makes its Circumventor software easily available; once installed on a proxy computer outside of China, a Chinese user can freely access the internet through a URL on that computer. According to BoingBoing.net co-editor Cory Doctorow, a gang of World of Warcraft warriors associated with the student group FreeCulture.org are planning to use the online multiplayer adventure game as a conduit for repressed information through the transfer of data character-to-character within the game. With enough players participating, it will be financially unfeasible for Blizzard Entertainment, the company that publishes WoW, to halt these actions. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a research group concerned with digital media and civic politics, is working on a program called Psiphon that exploits data streams used predominantly for financial transactions to make information both accessible and anonymous. Like Tor, it will link safe proxy servers to evade detection. There are also commercial businesses offering similar products and government organizations, such as the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, funding proxy servers located outside repressive countries but accessible from within them and set up for anonymous internet use.
These idealists work tirelessly to maintain the information superhighway’s free flow. If the internet could be said to have local conditions, this freedom is one of them. This neighbourhood, the place you inhabit when you are online, doesn’t tolerate barbed wire fences, attack dogs or book burnings. You’re allowed to decorate your house as you please and the local newspaper prints every letter to the editor. Businesses conduct themselves ethically, otherwise they’ll lose customers…. Okay, maybe I’m dreaming now, but it sounds like a nice place to live.
