Anonymity network Tor targeted by China

Tor: Enabling users to circumvent firewalls

A few months ago we reported how Chinese news sites had been told to implement new guidelines stating that users had to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments. Now comes the latest battle in Chinese online anonymity, with news that the Chinese government is going after leading anonymity technology, Tor.

The clampdown on Tor first came in the days leading up to China's National Day. During such periods of 'political sensitivity', it is normal for the government to clampdown on more 'controversial' sites as well as maintaining their national firewall.

"It was the first time the Chinese government has ever even included Tor in any sort of censorship circumvention effort," says Andrew Lewman, the executive director of Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains the Tor software and network speaking to Technology Review. "They were so worried about 1 October, they went to anything that could possibly circumvent their firewall and blocked it."

It is not the first time the Chinese government has tried to censor what their citizens view. Last year, the Chinese government famously tried to introduce a censorship software called Green Dam. It was set to be installed on all PCs sold in the country, but turned out to be a massive failure with the proposal being widely condemned by the online community and heavy lobbying by manufacturers... not to mention being easily circumventable.

It is easy to see why China would target Tor. The system is built around trying to find ways around firewalls. It does this by routing data through proxies in order to circumvent any government filters. For those monitoring internet networks, the traffic would seem to be coming from the proxies.

It is surprising that it has actually taken China this long to block Tor, especially as they are an open directory. Until late September, it was available for all users but on 25 September Chinese users dropped from around 10,000 to zero.

"Based on what we tested, it appears that they pulled the list on September 18, and it took until September 25 to get that into their firewall apparatus," says Lewman. Despite this, assorted workarounds such as "bridge computers" - IP addresses of volunteer computers who have agreed to connect users to the otherwise-blocked Tor network - have enabled those who are blocked, to get back online.

Wendy Seltzer, a law professor and research fellow at the University of Colorado who founded and developed the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a project to fight unjustified legal threats to the Internet was damning of the Chinese government's decision saying, "Watching China step up blocking around nationally significant events shows the degree of control they are trying to exercise."

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