Paul Baranowski sits in a small Toronto basement apartment surrounded by three computers hooked up to an LCD monitor and stacks of computer manuals. He describes his workspace as “minimalist,” but there’s nothing small about his mission. Baranowski, 28, is preparing to take on the biggest obstacle to the free flow of information in the world—the People’s Republic of China.
He hopes to do it by developing a program—he calls it Peek-a-Booty—that will enable Chinese Internet users to browse the Web without fear of detection. “It’s a very slow process,” says Baranowski, who works on the program with a roommate “whenever we have time.” The two have no outside financial support, says the computer engineer, who quit his job last year to devote himself to the project. “It’s purely about Internet freedom.” But Baranowski and other hacker activists, or hacktivists, opposed to government control of the Internet may just be banging their heads against the Great Firewall. In recent months, Beijing—using state-of-the-art technology—has significantly stepped up its efforts to control the country’s cyberspace, delaying dreams that the Internet would channel new ideas and freedom of expression in China. Some even wonder if the government hasn’t already turned the technology to its own advantage as a tool of repression. “The bad guys have had a victory of sorts,” says a Western diplomat in Beijing. “My friends who were cocky 18 months ago about the Internet are not so cocky now. There’s a lot more to be worried about.”
No one knows exactly how big China’s Internet police force is these days, although estimates run as high as 40,000. But whatever its size, its sophistication is greater than ever. The government’s new capabilities were revealed in September when it blocked access to the Google search engine for a week. When the blockade was lifted, Chinese surfers found their browsers’ cache function—once an easy way to access information from banned Web sites—disabled. More ominous, the government also had the ability to search for keywords, and to block “sensitive” Web pages, like those devoted to Taiwan, the Falun Gong or foreign news coverage. The software, which experts say is “a great technological leap forward,” punishes surfers who attempt to access blocked pages, preventing them from accessing the Web for up to to several hours. Chinese censors have also begun to employ filtering technology to block e-mails from the country’s 49.5 million Netizens.
And Chinese authorities are going on the offensive. Beijing has become quite skilled at hunting down proxy servers that allow users to maneuver around firewalls. The average cyberlife of a new proxy server is now about 30 minutes. Nor are Internet cafes havens any longer for exploring the Net. Cafes in Jiangxi province are experimenting with swipe cards linked to customers’ national ID cards. Some Beijing Internet cafes have installed surveillance cameras overlooking computer screens. One cafe manager took foreign reporters to a back room, where a police-linked computer, connected to four spy cameras, monitored users.
So how has China’s Internet lockdown come to be so effective, so fast? “There’s no way they could have done this without Western help,” says Baranowski, back in his Toronto apartment. “Even now, they need Western help to keep up their firewall. They simply don’t have enough people and the technology they need to do this.” In a report issued last month, Amnesty International singled out Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and Websense as U.S. corporations that are increasingly selling filtering hardware and software, among other products, to Chinese authorities. Eric Gutmann, a visiting fellow at the Project for the New American Century, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, claims that Chinese engineers familiar with Cisco’s operations told him that the U.S. company had “gone out of its way” to adapt its routers and firewall technology for China. “Cisco knew exactly what their equipment was going to be used for,” insists Gutmann. Terry Alberstein, Cisco’s head of Asian public relations, denies that the company tailors its products for the China market, adding, “If the government of China wants to monitor the Internet, that’s their business. We are basically politically neutral.”
But to some, being “neutral” is just a code for complicity. “Even if [Cisco] is not modifying their equipment for China—and I’m very skeptical about that—to me it makes no difference,” says Greg Walton, a freelance researcher focusing on the impact of technology on human rights. “It’s a great leap of the imagination to think this is not going to be used in harmful ways.” But with Western firms competing for a share of China’s rapidly expanding technology market—said to be worth more than $20 billion a year—it’s a safe bet they’ll continue to be drawn to morally questionable alliances.
And online freedom fighters—loose collections of Chinese dissidents and hacktivists—will continue to test the ingenuity of Chinese censors. Lin Hai, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for distributing 30,000 e-mail addresses to “overseas hostile publications,” now lives in the United States. He is developing software to enable Chinese surfers to circumvent government interference with free Web-based e-mail accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Researcher Walton says there are about 30 hacktivists around the world who are excellent programmers and who have taken up the cause of Internet freedom in China. ‘There is a romantic tinge to the whole thing,” says Walton, but he thinks they’d be more effective if they teamed up with the “thousands of people working in university labs” rather than acting as “lone wolves.”
Baranowski concedes that China has the edge now, but says that the final victory will belong to the side willing to invest the most. Arguments like that have put a bill before the U.S. Congress—the Global Internet Freedom Act—that would set aside $50 million in 2003 and 2004 to help small players develop ways to bypass Internet controls around the world. Others believe no amount of money will level the playing field. ”[Beijing] puts unlimited resources into these things,” says Xiao Qiang, director of New York-based Human Rights in China. William Farris, a senior specialist on the Internet for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, agrees: “If we decide to spend $30 million here, the Chinese government will spend $100 million.”
Change, they say, must come from the people within the censors’ walls—like Huang Qi, who was detained 21/2 years ago for setting up China’s first domestic human-rights Web site. As the police stormed into his house to arrest Huang and his wife, he posted a final message: “The road is still long. Thanks to all who make an effort on behalf of democracy in China. They have come. So long.” Cries for help like that may keep the hacktivists going long after the money runs out.