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David
David
Iran Jails More Journalists and Blocks Web Sites

Today I read the following New York Times's article: Iran Jails More Journalists and Blocks Web Sites. I've been concerned about this issue for a few years now, in regards to China's similar actions. I think that there is a technical solution here. What we need to do is to set up a global distributed network of secure proxies, both within and outside of Iran/China. It'd work like this. Let's say that person A is within Iran/China, and B is a computer outside of Iran. When person A wants to see a web page (let's say of Amnesty International, which would surely be blocked), B would receive the web page and encrypt it, then send the encrypted version to A. Anyone listening to A's internet connection would be unable to see what web page this person is viewing. There are some important details here. First, the Chinese government could easily just block access to the proxies. Thus, we need a very large and dispersed network of proxies, which would make it impossible to block. Second, it is important that there be proxies *within* the country (China or Iran), storing cached versions of the data. This way, if the government decides to block all Internet access going outside of the country, some of the data will still be available. Third, individual users need to be instructed to turn off their browser's caching mechanism, so that it is more difficult for the government to see what they were looking at if they were to come knocking at their door. Fourth, this needs to be implemented simultaneously on tens of thousands of computers. The government would then have to choose between prosecuting everyone or letting the practice continue. Especially for China, which is becoming a global trade power, total enforcement would result in a significant blow to their economy, which would be a good deterrant.

November 8, 2004 | 7:00 AM Comments  0 comments

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dsontag David Sontag
November 8, 2004 | 4:09 PM
What if encryption was invisible?
I have many oversights :) Please keep pointing them out. There are technical solutions to everything! We just need to brainstorm a bit. For example: I claim that I can make encryption invisible to listeners. Encryption only looks like encryption because of a message's binary format and random-looking content. There are various ways to get around this. The easiest to understand is encoding a message in an image (this has been done by terrorists and is a major security concern of the USA). You flip a few bits in various places in an image, and to the onlooker they can't notice a difference... a dog still looks like a dog. However, to a program processing the image on the receiving side, the message appears. It has actually been *proven* (by computer security researchers) that the hidden message is unrecognizable except by the receiving party. With some more thinking, I'm confident that I can find a way to encode messages in plain text also (cheesiest example would be code words). This doesn't solve all the problems -- in particular, I'm worried about the proxy locations being recognized -- but it could make the data transfer look a lot less suspicious. The government, listening on to the internet connection, would not be able to realize, from looking at the data alone, that the user is downloading encrypted material.
lukecholerton Luke Cholerton-Bozier
November 9, 2004 | 9:06 AM

Image-based encryption is good, but in countries where broadband is scarce, downloading encrypted websites using images is going to take a long time (you'll probably say compression, but that only works to a certain extent). To be honest though, I can't think of a solution that covers all the possible points. I would suggest satellite-based internet access (like sat. phones, they can't be traced or broken into), but then how would you distribute these to where they're needed (Astra-Ses actually provides broadband internet access through the same channels as satellite tv - this is possibly the solution with the most potential)? I would suggest Wi-Max (super-range wireless networks) as a distribution point (setup by foreign countries/companies etc.), perhaps based in embassies; the host country would find a way of blocking them, and even if they didn't, how would you get everyone in Beijing for example to get wi-fi cards fitted to their computers? There's also dial-up through foreign ISPs (i.e. dialling upto the internet using a number in a neighbouring country) but this could prove expensive; I heard of some people doing this in the middle-east. Currently, there are a lot of people in these countries that do use foreign proxies to get around the firewalls, I think this will continue along with the ping-pong game of blocked proxies/new proxies until the world can find a solution.
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