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Iranians Outwit Censors With Falun Gong Software
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that since last year more than 400,000 Iranians began surfing the uncensored Web using software created for the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999. More than 20 countries now use increasingly sophisticated blocking and filtering systems for Internet content, according to Reporters Without Borders, including Iran, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The creators of the software seized upon by Iranians are members of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, based largely in the United States and closely affiliated with Falun Gong. Interestingly enough, the United States government and the Voice of America have financed some of the circumvention technology efforts, and a coalition is organizing to push for more Congressional financing of anti-filtering efforts, bringing together dissidents of Vietnam, Iran, the Uighur minority of China, Tibet, Myanmar, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, as well as the Falun Gong, to lobby Congress for the financing. 'What is our leverage toward a country like Iran? Very little,' said Michael Horowitz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. 'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'"
Hopefully the citizens of Britain and Australia and Germany can get a hold of this software so that they can use the Internet without government censorship impeding them.
"The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it". People can do so too.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
... of a world without frontiers or lines, united through their common love of pirated games and porn download torrents.
Since the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, Iran has politically regressed to a very dangerous stage. However, culturally the country is still very close to America. Despite the religiosity demanded by the mullahs, many consolations have been made to keep the populace from rioting.
From simple things like not requiring a full hijab to really bizarre things like ultra-temporary marriages to allow single men the pleasures of prostitutes legally under Sharia. Iran is a country struggling to break back into the modern world.
The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there, the better the odds of Iran returning to the peaceful international fold.
Look at the military industry for example. There is a large market for guns, shells and missiles on one side, and also large market for bulletproof vests, armour and missile defense on the other side.
This is a similar situation. Especially the makers of internet filtering software, such as Cisco, should take note of this emerging market opportunity.
So, we should really keep the markets do their own thing, and the economy will grow and prosper.
Falun Gong/Falun Dafa have been brutalized by the Chinese government for years for doing nothing more than practicing a mental and physical discipline.
They are experts in software like this because their leadership is almost certainly under constant surveillance.
Voice of America started as a radio network for broadcasting news that shows a different point of view from that by censors in the old Soviet Bloc.
This just seems a continuation of the same mission.
In the same way that an object does not "want" to fall when it is dropped, or a species does not "want" to evolve.
But it will, regardless, simply because that is its natural state.
Technoli
Interestingly enough, the United States government and the Voice of America have financed some of the circumvention technology efforts,
Would that count as a cyber attack on Iran or China?
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"'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'"
Right, because those dumb Iranians couldn't possibly know anything until POTUS tells 'em about it. Obama will just do a two minute webcast on how many great jobs are available in the American auto industry, bookended by lolcats, and the government will fall!
Sheesh.
First, I'll state that I support this, worldwide.
That said, I find it a bit whacked that on one hand we have part of our government demanding filtering and selective blocking of websites in public locations and schools. While at the same time a different part of our government is supporting and funding software to bypass filtering and blocking.
Maybe we should drop the Politically Correct filtering efforts and quit wasting everybody's money. After all, isn't that what our government seems to be saying to other countries? Or is it just our country and our allies that are allowed to filter? Come on USA, get your story straight.
Will this software give them a voice? Will it allow them to get a fair or timely trial or avoid being tortured by the Americans?
Hell no.
Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world. You're assuming those thousands of Iranians would actually want to download messages from Obama, rather than downloading porn. As a general rule, the more repressed people's public lives are, the more sleazy their secret, private lives become. Iran has a huge surplus of educated but unemployed young men. I suspect that "free porn" is pretty high on their list of motivations for defeating filters, while "hearing what Obama has to say" is pretty low. Especially given that Obama doesn't speak Farsi. Porn is universal, it needs no translation. When was the last time you saw a foreign language porn flick with subtitles? One doesn't really need to understand the language to follow the plot line in a porn flick. And their stage direction is mostly just:
In!
Out.
In!
Out.
In!
Out.
In!
Out.
Actor 1 moans...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk?
For what purpose? So he can apologize?
No mention of the U.K., Germany, or Australia which are also implementing blocking technologies? Very western of us to ignore the other supposed free countries.
Our people are speaking freely!
"the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that has been suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999"
Falun Gong. Do we need yet another weird cult added to the very long list of those already available. Something for everyone. What was wrong with the weird cults of yesteryear? Long live Mao and down with hegemony of running dogs for western capitalists exploiters.
davecb5620@gmail.com
...in North Korea, where the Internet is simply prohibited altogether.
. . . free market sophistry makes when you stretch it almost to the breaking point.
This comparison is NONSENSE. TOA details a case of a counter culture's home-brew counter measures being used to get around state censorship. It's not like Iranians went to Best Buy to buy a copy of Freedom Industries' new app.
Not every problem in the world is amenable to "free market" solutions. Deal with it.
From google cache:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:d3NzsFRIiU4J:english.peopledaily.com.cn/200103/20/eng20010320_65533.html+falun+gong+suicides&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
IMHO Some things should be outlawed.
Now they can use upcoming.com to find out about stonings of women that have been raped and use craigslist to sell off their eight-year-old kids to 50-year-old men like the Muslim men in countries without Internet censorship...
It's funny how certain kinds of people praise the defiance of authority like this but admonish those who defeat filters in school to access controversial information. They force their public schools and libraries to install buggy censorware which has been demonstrated time and time again to block legitimate but incorrectly categorized information.
Heck, the Australian and German governments filter their entire countries, for ostentatious "think of the children" reasons, but all it takes is a flip of a switch for it to go political. Neither country historically has much of a problem with certain kinds of political censorship.
How long ago was it that we had Republicans telling us to watch what we say?
We need a pan-national dedication to transparency and the free flow of information. The people who scream about Iranian and Chinese injustice the loudest are also some of the worst censors at home. The free world won't be until we hold our own people accountable.
The market is only effective at maximizing profit, regardless of the consequences for human rights, or the environment, or whatever.
For instance, if there's a market for selling drugs that kill people for enormous profit, the market will kill people, buy off scientists to claim that their product does not kill people, buy politicians who will support their operations, and sell those drugs to children in countries where there is no effective legislation. If you think that petrochemicals, genetically modified crops, pharmaceuticals, growth hormones, soft drinks, and fast food franchises are any different than cigarettes, I think you're completely naive.
Just like a democracy functions only with a check against corruption with a strong and critical news media, markets only function with a strong and legitimate regulatory body that checks against greed and exploitation of irreplaceable resources.
Corporatism and unregulated markets are tyrannical. The people with the most money control society with near impunity, a fact they forget to mention in Econ 101 when they talk about voting with your dollars.
It's ironic that the Times article quotes Orwell.
"Blocking such groups has become more insidious as Internet filtering technology has grown more sophisticated. As with George Orwell's "Newspeak," the language in "1984" that got smaller each year, governments can block particular words or phrases without users realizing their Internet searches are being censored."
A couple of years ago the Times did another story on how The Voice of America has been engaged in creating newspeak: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/washington/31voice.html
"Using a 1,500-word vocabulary and short, simple phrases" Oh and don't forget to add some good old fashioned censorship. "A 1948 law prohibits Voice of America from broadcasting in the United States"
But some listeners, like Ali Asqar Khandan, 36, an assistant professor from Tehran, said Special English seemed like "a special program for advertising American life and culture, not a simple radio station for broadcasting news or teaching English."
No need to broadcast it here anyway.
We'll let you know what should and should not be censored thank you very much.
Can somebody please pass the kool-aid?
"Oh drat, these computers, they're so naughty and so complex." Marvin the Martian
well done Falun Gong and Iranian geeks.
'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'
What a pathetic example of typical Western arrogance. The usual "America is the best place in the world and everyone should want to be like us" bullshit. Fuck off and learn your place in the world already...what exactly is any Western leader going to say to the Irani population that would "change the world" ? Iranis are using anti-censorship tech to get access to information they want, which doesn't happen to be your propaganda message. Maybe you conveniently forgot but they still vividly remember how the US financed and supplied Saddam's war against Iran in which biological and chemical weapons were used. How about lifting your sanctions and shutting your hypocritcal cakehole about state sponsored terrorism when America supports Saudi Arabia and Israel, the two REAL biggest state sponsors of terrorism? Those actions would speak a lot louder than some pointless, hollow two minute webcast. That won't happen however...as they need both Saudi oil and the Jewish vote. For the US government, those two things are, figuratively speaking, as addictive and judgement-clouding as heroin.
I seriously doubt the Iranians censor much in the way of non-pornographic English material.
After downloading videos of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and the Octomom, Iranians will probably turn off their computers and go outside to continue their "Death to America" chant!
We're not really going with what's published in the "People's Daily", are we? That's exactly why this software needs to exist in the first place.
Falun Gong teaches against killing and against suicide. The Chinese communist party pumps out stories saying whatever serves their agenda. Google "False Fire" and catch up on that one.
The Chinese communist party has gone to every length to make the western world consider Falun Gong as strange/dangerous. Is it working? China has a very long history of spiritual teachings from the Buddhist school, and Falun Gong has adhered to non violence in the face of torture/killing for 10 years. I, for one, am ready to support human rights and freedom of belief for anyone who's not harming other people in the process, and Falun Gong has been exemplary in this regard. Look it up.
Here is a speech by David Matas and David Kilgour (July 6, 2006) about their research that confirms that China has been using Falun Gong practitioners as organ inventory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkf2u1Umzi4
So here is the deal. In the US I am responsible for the action users on my company Internet and Computers do. If someone hits an adult site, or even something simple as a tasteless joke can get me in trouble. If someone sneaks content onto a work PC, I am responsible. That is USA Law and/or case law.
So the category anonymous Internet is blocked.
So if the US gets behind bypass technology such as this, where do I sit? If a person on my network bypasses my Internet filtering by using sanction USA bypass technology and puts illegal/questionable content on his PC and a co worker is offend, who is legally responsible? I am, of course.
In China most Falun Gong supporters just get harrassed and maybe jailed.
Iran tends to just execute people by rather brutal methods.
There appears to me to be a whole lot of "Validity by Association" going on here.
I looked up Global Information Freedom, Inc. - and I'm having trouble finding this close association so noted in TFSummary. Clearly, GIFInc, is very concerned about the Great Firewall - but here's the only Falun Gong reference that I could find - http://www.internetfreedom.org/The-High-Tech-Persecution-of-Falun-Gong-in-China (which seems to cover a helluva lot more than the Falun Gong).
The Falun Gong has become the darling political football around here - note House Resolution 794, June 12, 2006, called for the PRC to square away human rights abuses and cited the Falun Gong. Note also, FWIW, my first awareness of the Falun Gong was from the Wall Street Journal - at a time when I was spending most all of my time in Asia. Interestingly, or may I say not-surprisingly, the WSJ's quotes are reference material for Congress - note the following study: http://www.usembassy.it/pdf/other/RL33437.pdf
So - Iranians are behind a firewall and there's software to help.
I'm not pleased with the summary - unless there's some actual evidence linking Global Information Freedom, Inc with the Falun Gong - real linking, i.e., GIFInc is funded by Falun Gong or is the Falun Gong's internet mouthpiece, then I call not only shenanigans but also shame:
Don't Iranians have enough fucking trouble without being linked to the Falun Gong? Was there a need for this sensationalism and association?
Is the issue that Iranians suffer censorship? Or that the censorship can be broken - the Great Firewall experience applies here?
Or, is the issue that we need to mention an entirely different and completely controversial belief system to sell mindshares?
I apologize in advance if I'm wrong about the Global Information Freedom, Inc crowd - but that apology is provisional upon proof of the linking claim, which I have yet to find.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The last sentence of the article:
As for the Falun Gong software, it proved a little too popular among Iranians. By the end of last year the consortium's computers were overwhelmed. On Jan. 1, the consortium had to do some blocking of its own: It shut down the service for all countries except China.
Breaking their firewall is really nothing to brag about, it took me about 5 minutes to ssh into my server in the US and apt-get tinyproxy. As far as I could tell they make no effort to block proxies at all.
Holy Crap! Except for the "FreeGate/DWeb Tech Support" link, all other supports forums for their products are being spammed with pr0n pics by the same forum troll. LOL
Look near the bottom for the english support links:
http://www.internetfreedom.org/node/66
to be used for starting sentences (or paragraphs) that are continued in the body of the post.
(Which isn't to say I disagree with your post, I just really dislike the habit of starting a sentence or a thought in the subject line...It makes for more a more confusing, disjointed reading of the post.)
-Trillian
If I understand correctly all this software do is use several proxy which are then used to browse filtered website.
The problem AFAIK is that those who filter the web could get the proxy list and track the IP address of those who connect to the proxys and then these user would have *nasty* question to answer..
So this solution isn't very anonymous, a better scheme would be to hide the traffic on encrypted connections with 'normal' website, but this would require the server to be used as a relay..
On the surface one would think that increased relations between two dictatorships would result in less freedom for both peoples. But instead, contacts with the Chinese have benefited dissident groups in both countries immensely.
This leads to some interesting ideas. Maybe when these dictators have their lovefests, we might encourage them rather than discourage them, as, it does force those countries to open up to at least -somebody-. Thus, putting and keeping pressure on the likes of Iran and Venezuala while actively encouraging democracies underneath seems to remain a good foreign policy.
Then, in the case of Iran, if it is dissidents were talking about, and democracy that we support...
WHY THE HELL DOESN'T THE USA HAVE WIRELESS HOTSPOTS RUNNING FREE ON THE IRANIAN BORDER? IN FACT, WHY AREN'T WE COVERTLY RUNNING OUR OWN INTERNET INTO IRAN?
(well maybe we are and the whole Falun Gong thing is a cover story)
but if not.
We paid for freedom in the middle east with 5000 lives and billions of dollars. I would think that if there are groups in Iran yearning to breath free, then, here is a clear example of where the USA should support them.
We should just be sending truckloads of internet satellite modems across the border to Iran.
This is my sig.
Let's invade them! They're pirating software!
...
What's that? Everyone thinks that's good??
Let's invade them! They're censoring the internet!
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there
I would assume that the words would go together like this: "we ~ here" (if you were in Iran) or "they ~ there" (if you were to leave Iranian matters to the Iranian people).
Oh well...
Sometimes I just want to hang my head and cry, when I see this kind of crap. Really. I mean, just describing Falun Gong as "a spiritual movement that has been suppressed by the Chinese government since 1999" - do you know what they stand for? What they do and what consequences it has had? Just because they preach about peace and morality doesn't mean that they are guaranteed to be entirely kosher; words are cheap and you can buy that kind of things canned from any competent advertising agency. At least, check things out thoroughly before you begin to put your stamp of approval on them and use them in your propaganda - I think you will find Falun Gong are somewhat less idyllic than you imagine; like most modern "religions" it is simply a money-making scam, playing in their propaganda on the habitual American distrust of any government in general and the Chinese one in particular. In short, don't be a useful idiot.
But back to the topic: the use of "circumvention technology" - I think there are two concerns to address here. One is the question of who made it - can you trust them? Falun Gong are not necessarily the bright eyed idealists they'd like you to think - there is a lot of money involved, for one thing, which always rings my alarm bells. And the US government is involved too, we hear - the very people that I always hear are nothing but the lowest scum (funny, really, when you think about it, the the Americans always elect the lowest scum for office); people you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw them. I wonder if their "circumvention technology" might contain backdoors and other nice things that could make it easy for them to track you?
The other concern is how much it actually is worth, sneaking out in anonymity? Amongst the things that are glaringly obvious are that this kind of SW certainly help criminals avoid the law; and of course, you can more easily access things like crappy porn or anti-government propaganda. What it can't guarantee is that you get access to good, reliable information or that you are able to understand what you find, and it won't help you much in changing society. In fact, I think it may well wor in the opposite direction - if you are against the government, you sneak around in a fashion that makes it easy for the government to say "Look, he was a criminal", which will in the end harm the cause you say you are working for. Secret societies and subversive underground movements all play into the hands of a repressive government - the only way to really effect a change is by doing so in the open, by showing that you are better and more trustworthy than the government. And, yes, that is sometimes dangerous, that is the nature of the game, unfortunately.
Of course, the US government or their more or less secret state agencies have a long history of stirring up discontent in countries they can't control in a more direct way. It is a well-known secret that CIA agents were involved in whipping up the sentiments before the Tiananmen incident, something that strangely enough doesn't get much press in the West. This kind of things is what really keeps conflicts brewing for ages, long after they would normally have died out or found a peaceful solution. As I see it, it is idiotic - in the end it is bound to hurt American interests.