Tearing Down That Firewall

Tearing Down That Firewall

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"The Internet is a vast, fast, and inexpensive way to access information, to communicate, and to organize. It is perhaps the greatest hope for global information freedom and democratization, and it provides an important vehicle for the development of civil societies."

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"China is perhaps the best example of systematic control of the Internet. Tens of thousands of cyber police engage in monitoring and surveillance of Internet users, some of whom end up in prison for voicing their opinions online. China’s “golden shield” – censorship technologies developed with the help of western corporations like Cisco – blocks many websites completely, and filter out topics deemed too politically sensitive by the ruling party."


"China’s model of Internet censorship is now being emulated elsewhere. The repressive governments such as that of Burma, Cuba, Iran, and now some Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union..."

"...the anti-censorship systems like that of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium – GIF for short, which has been providing millions in closed societies with free access to the Internet for years."

"GIF consists of a small team of dedicated Chinese-American engineers, including myself, who were brought together by our practice of Falun Gong. Many of us were also among the students on Tiananmen Square during the 1989 Massacre..."

"...Today approximately over 90% of anti-censorship traffic comes through our servers"

"...During the Saffron Revolution in Burma in late August 2007, we experienced a three-fold increase in average daily traffic from Burma. ..."

"...when uprisings in Tibet led to thousands of arrests and large-scale human rights abuses, we saw our traffic from that region increase by over 400%."

"Perhaps the best example of the role of GIF software was during the Iranian elections this past June, when our traffic from Iran increased by nearly 600%. On the Saturday of June 20, an estimated over 1 million Iranians used our system to visit previously censored websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google. The Iranian users posted videos, photos, and messages about the bloody crackdown."

"GIF systems have also been of benefit to US-based organizations such as Human Rights in China, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia – and even companies like Google and Yahoo who self-censor, since we bring the uncensored version of their services into closed societies."

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"The services GIF provides are invaluable, and the impact goes far beyond the Internet.......
Internet freedom has the potential of transforming the closed societies in a peaceful but powerful way that must not be underestimated."

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"....for every dollar we spend on anti-censorship technologies, repressive governments must spend hundreds—perhaps thousands—of dollars to block us."

"Congress is now considering a $30m appropriation for Internet freedom that, if passed, could allow us to increase our current user capacity from 1.5 million people per day up to 50 million per day, and allow us to greatly enhance the rate at which our technology switches users’ IP addresses. These developments would make it prohibitively expensive for any repressive government to counter our efforts"

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Original report from 
Shiyu Zhou, "Tearing Down That Firewall",October 22, 2009,
(http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1528 ).