Useful technologies for cracking the great firewall


Adapted from Rebecca MacKinnon’s “Working From Mainland China,” New Media Workshop, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong

It’s important to educate yourself about internet censorship and security before you leave for China—don’t wait until after arrival to think about these issues. Two useful resources are:

There are several useful technologies that will allow you to circumvent internet blocks and protect against snooping on your internet connection (by governments, companies, or identity thieves). Unfortunately, thanks to China’s internet censorship, many websites that you need to access are blocked in mainland China. Fortunately, there are many technologies for you to get around the blocks. Before traveling to mainland China, you should set up at least one of the following:

1. VPN—Virtual Private Network

A VPN creates a “tunnel” between your computer and a remote network. Many large news organizations (as well as businesses and universities) have their own VPN systems that connect you directly to your home office’s network. If your organization has one, be sure you’ve set up your computer to connect to the VPN, and tested it out, before you depart for China. If your employer does not have a VPN for you to use or you’re a freelancer, there are a number of options for purchasing a personal VPN or using another free VPN service (though you need to make sure the people operating it are trustworthy). One personal VPN service highly recommended by people working in China is the WiTopia Personal VPN (http://www.witopia.net/personalmore.html).

2. Tor

Tor (https://tor.eff.org/) is an “anonymizing” tool that utilizes an “onion routing” system. It sends your requests for web pages and any other data through several “nodes” in many parts of the world, which makes it difficult or impossible for Chinese internet service providers (ISPs) to “see” what website you are really trying to visit.

You should use Tor with Firefox, which can be downloaded at: www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox.

You can download Tor at: https://tor.eff.org/download.html.en

Tor does not prevent operators of Tor “exit nodes” from viewing the data you are sending. Some Tor exit node operators are more trustworthy than others. Some are in mainland China. No circumvention system is foolproof. If you do not want anyone to see the content of your email, you must use encrypted email (see below for how to encrypt your email).

3. Psiphon

Psiphon (http://psiphon.civisec.org/) requires that you have access to a trusted computer outside of mainland China that will always be turned on, and whose owner (if the computer is not yours) trusts you not to use the computer’s internet connection in a way that might be illegal in his or her home jurisdiction. You install a “Psiphon node” on that computer, then log into it remotely when you are in the mainland, enabling you to access the internet via that computer’s ISP. It’s good to have a backup method handy in case that computer gets turned off or goes down accidentally when you are using its connection.