Psiphon, a new anti-censorship tool that promises barrier-free web access to those living with restrictive government censors such as residents of China and Iran, is scheduled to launch on Dec. 1. The Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Relations developed the tool to fight the war against government censorship.
“[Psiphon will be] an easy-to-use and secure way to allow citizens to exercise their basic human rights of access to information,” said Dr. Ronald Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab and a professor of political science.
Psiphon allows users in censored countries to access blocked online content securely, through servers in an uncensored country with a unique web address, user name, and password. Upon entry to a website, a new toolbar will appear in the user’s browser, letting them browse the web unwatched by censorship computers.
The toolbar fetches content for users from the uncensored server and sends it back through an encrypted “https” channel-the same one used by banks and commercial websites for financial transactions. As a result, a user’s connection to Psiphon will be hidden beneath an electronic web of global financial traffic, and look like another E-bay transaction.
Deibert believes it is almost impossible for authorities to block Psiphon.
“For these governments, it will be a matter of shutting the internet off or cutting off e-commerce,” he said.
The creation of Psiphon can be traced back to Deibert’s twin interests in information technology and international relationships. In 2002, Deibert and collaborators from Cambridge University and the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School started the OpenNet Initiative to document patterns of internet censorship around the world. Using reports from advocacy organizations and volunteers in censored countries, the group determined how censors operate and what they try to filter out.
The group has found varying degrees of internet censorship around the world, from Germany filtering hate sites with Nazi messages to extensive national efforts in China to block political, religious and human rights information using government-controlled servers that sift through every bit of virtual traffic.
All internet communications in China go through one of the nine “gateways” that filter out materials like references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and Tibetan independence. When a viewer tries to access a banned site in China, not only will the surfer receive a network error, but the user’s unique IP address will “freeze” for twenty seconds to three minutes, stopping the flow of data.
According to Deibert, governments in the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Yemen also use commercial filtering software, often developed in the United States. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are also known to filter content in their Chinese versions.
Unlike other anti-censorship programs, Psiphon installs no software on the user’s computer, leaving no evidence that could be cause for interrogation in some countries.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of Psiphon is its dependence on a social network of trust. Almost any home computer in an uncensored country can become a Psiphon server, or “node,” and allow trusted friends and families in a monitored country to surf freely.
In contrast to other censorship circumvention alternatives, such as publicly accessible IP addresses with large-scale servers that are easily blocked by authorities once detected, each Psiphon “node” is independent from all others, and known only to a few individuals, making it more difficult for authorities to track them down.
“The first and foremost of our intention is to protect the user, the person at the censored location, who is most at risk. That is why it works through social networks of trust and the https connection.” Deibert emphasized.
Deibert is optimistic that U of T’s vast network, with connections to countries with pervasive censorship laws, will help distribute Psiphon globally.
Psiphon software and source code will be released for free on the web at http://psiphon.civisec.org. While concerned about how authorities will try to defeat software like Psiphon, Deibert believes releasing the program as an open source will enhance the software by letting others make their own improvements.
