Foiling Beijing's Cyber Cops

LA Times
Foiling Beijing's Cyber Cops

'Tunnels' help Chinese users bypass censorship and access blocked Western websites.
By Bill Xia, chief executive officer of Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. (www.dit-inc.us)
July 3, 2006

…
It's not easy to stay one step ahead of the cyber police, given the enormous resources the Chinese government devotes to cutting its people off from the free exchange of opinions and information.

We launched DynaWeb in March 2002, and within six months, our domain was "hijacked."
Users who tried to get to our "middleman" servers were diverted to bogus servers that led them nowhere. Some users, however, provided us with detailed information collected from their computers, and thanks to this help, we were able to thwart the hijacking and resume operations after three painful weeks.

Our volunteers have proved again and again that we can defeat even China's costly technologies and its legions of Internet police. Chinese citizens are hungry for uncensored information. When we first launched, one excited user sent us a message that read, simply, "Thank you" — repeated hundreds of times.

I believe that information — that the truth — can change China. And I believe that the Communist regime has never really represented the Chinese people. Which leaves me with two questions for American and multinational companies such as Google and Yahoo (which have been cooperating with the Chinese government in censoring China's Internet): Which China do you want to win over? And which China do you really want as your business partner?