I think there are mole tunnels under the Great Firewall of China. Here’s the story as to why.
Chinese internet censorship – aka the Great Firewall of China – has been much discussed recently, generally around the time of the Olympics and then again more recently when it was announced China would photograph all users of Internet cafes. Some argue that nothing can or should be done from the outside, expressing the opinions that it’s none of our business, most Chinese don’t care about censorship, and/or Chinese censorship really isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be anyway.
Well, my parents grew up in a free country that turned totalitarian, before they immigrated to the US. Perhaps for that reason, I think classical US First Amendment freedoms matter a lot, even as updated for an online era. Maybe you do too. Or, if you don’t, maybe you just find the technological came of censorship cat-and-mouse interesting.
According to a late 2007 white paper put out by a group of censorship fighters called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, censorship-fighting technology is modestly successful at letting Chinese residents surf the internet freely. In particular, they claim somewhat under 300,000 users of their offerings, which suggests that .02% of Chinese have uncensored internet access, while 99.98% do not.
There are issues with that paper. For example, it gets confused as to whether it’s discussing internet censorship around the world in general or Chinese censorship in particular. Nor can it fully decide whether it’s speaking on behalf of the companies it discusses, or just about them. Still, on factual matters like technology or numbers, it feels pretty credible. And while it got a reasonable amount of press coverage a few months ago, one very interesting point in it seems to have been overlooked.
The paper repeatedly mentions circumvention tunnels and tunnel discovery agents. In essence, hackers find weaknesses in the Great Firewall of China, and use them to let censorship-free internet traffic in (mainly) and out of China. Is the white paper spreading disinformation? I don’t think so. As one plausibility argument, Anonymizer’s simpler, hacker-free approach is highly successful in Iran, but has little penetration in China.
So how can they do that? Common theories are that the authorities, despite huge investments in censorship, somehow either can’t or don’t care about defeating this circumvention. After all, most Chinese are still censored, Chinese are pretty free now to travel outside the country, etc. and so on. Besides, the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it anyway.
I don’t buy it. Chinese government-friendly hackers are known to be state-art-of-the-art. The problem isn’t ignorance. Nor is it plausibly lack of effort. The way to defeat these efforts is to pose as a user, learn about the friendly IP addresses and the like the same time genuine users do, and then shut them down. That process can surely be greatly automated.
So I find only two theories plausible. One is that the government deliberately isn’t being as repressive as it could, so as to leave a little bit of a safety valve open. That’s not wholly unrealistic. The other is that something – which is to say somebody – is keeping Chinese censors from operating at maximum effectiveness. That’s what I think is really going on.
No security system is perfect – even if the technology is, the management processes around it never are. So suppose somebody with inside knowledge helped outsiders discover the Great Firewall’s imperfections. Bingo. Security gets violated. And by the way – the mole knows exactly how to evade detection.
That’s why I think there are mole tunnels under the Great Firewall of China.
