By Eva Dou in Beijing and Alistair Barr in San Francisco
U.S. tech companies are caught in the middle of an escalating
battle between China's increasingly active Internet censors and the
free-speech activists determined to thwart them.
Activists outside of China say they are disguising Internet
traffic banned by Beijing--which includes anything from social
networks such as Facebook and Twitter, to Gmail and news
websites--by tunneling it encrypted through cloud servers run by
major U.S. companies.
These cloud services run by Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp.,
Akamai Technologies Inc. and others are meant to help businesses
improve their website speeds by storing their data on remote
servers. But activists say they are using them to get around
China's so-called Great Firewall, which could draw the cloud
providers unwillingly into the censorship clash.
To stem the flow of prohibited content, authorities would need
to block entire servers of these companies, disrupting hundreds of
businesses, according to the activists.
"Essentially, it's similar to forcing authoritarian regimes to
kill everyone in a protest because they can't tell the real
agitators from the bystanders," said Adam Fisk, a Los Angeles-based
programmer who in 2013 founded an app called Lantern that is
designed to outmaneuver censors. Lantern uses the method along with
other groups such as anticensorship activist group Greatfire.org
and anonymous communications software provider Tor.
The workarounds are generally implemented without the cloud
providers' consent and threaten their operations in China. Verizon
Communications Inc.'s cloud service EdgeCast was blocked in
November last year, while other cloud providers have cut off
service to activists in an effort to avoid getting blocked. The
Cyberspace Administration of China didn't respond to requests for
comment.
China's Internet censors have strengthened content screening in
recent months, creating difficulties for businesses and disrupting
more commonly used firewall-circumvention software called virtual
private networks, which connect users to the Web through a proxy
server overseas. President Xi Jinping has ordered tighter control
of online content that may undermine the ruling Communist Party,
with bloggers facing jail for spreading what the government says
are false rumors.
The cloud-cloaking process used by Lantern depends on what are
called content delivery networks, or CDNs, a service offered by the
cloud-computing arms of companies like Amazon and Microsoft. The
cloud helps businesses' websites run faster by saving copies of its
data at multiple locations around the world.
An activist can sign up for a free or paid account with a
network and link a blocked website to it. Users behind the firewall
download an app or software that routes them to the mirror version
of the banned website. Since the data gets encrypted, censors can't
see the content.
Reporters Without Borders said last week it used a similar
tactic to unblock nine banned political websites in different
countries, such as the Tibet Post in China and the Gulf Center for
Human Rights in the United Arab Emirates.
"The philosophy is to make it as expensive to block as possible,
so that there would be a lot of collateral damage," said Philipp
Winter, a Swedish computer scientist who researches censorship
technology.
U.S. cloud companies are wary of being seen by Beijing as linked
to activists, especially in a worsening climate for foreign tech
firms.
CloudFlare, which offers content-delivery network services, said
last week it cut off Lantern's use of the service, saying it was
unauthorized. "We don't do anything to thwart the content
restrictions in China or other countries," said Matthew Prince,
chief executive of CloudFlare. "We're a tech company and we comply
with the law."
Lantern's Mr. Fisk said he believes people should have access to
the unfiltered Internet. "The freedom of access to information is a
bedrock of an informed citizenry," he said. Lantern has more users
in China than it does in any other country.
China hasn't resorted to widespread blockages of delivery
networks because of the potential economic consequences, activists
say. China's market for cloud-computing services reached US$1.1
billion in 2014, and is expected to grow by 45% this year,
according to research firm IDC. Many of the country's biggest firms
rely on such services, as do around 60% of Chinese small- and
medium-size companies, according to a survey last year by S&P
Consulting.
Many technology companies have come up against ethical dilemmas
related to China's Internet firewall. Google Inc. pulled some of
its operations out in 2010 over censorship issues. Cisco Systems
Inc. was the target of a 2011 lawsuit by free-speech advocates for
selling equipment to China that helped censors block websites.
Cisco, which won a dismissal of the lawsuit last year, said it sold
generic routers to China and wasn't involved in censorship.
Greatfire.org began creating mirror sites in 2013 and now has
10, including a copy of Google, an uncensored version of Chinese
microblog website Weibo, and a news website called Boxun that is
often critical of the Chinese government, according to a person who
identified himself as the spokesman for Greatfire.
The organization uses Amazon and Akamai, among other providers,
for its mirrors, according to Greatfire's spokesman. Amazon
declined to comment. An Akamai spokesman said the company has no
record of Greatfire using Akamai's service, adding that the
company's policies forbid customers from "placing illegal content
on our platform in any jurisdiction, including China."
Tor, a software for anonymous online communications, has used
the workaround after it was initially blocked in China in 2009,
said one of the group's founders, Roger Dingledine. Several Tor
add-ons were deployed in the past year that disguise Tor traffic as
Skype calls, or as data from cloud-service providers like Microsoft
Azure or Amazon, and so far they are working in China, he said.
Tor's programmers need to constantly refine their techniques as
China's censors are constantly strengthening the firewall,
according to Mr. Dingledine. "This is an arms race," he said.
Write to Eva Dou at eva.dou@wsj.com and Alistair Barr at
alistair.barr@wsj.com
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