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Kevin Chen

Mr. Amaral

Writing For High School AM Class

27 July 2009

Why Internet censorship is impossible

Countries like North Korea, China, and Iran are all censoring the Internet in their countries.

They believe that by doing this, they can stop the free flow of information, therefore leaving the

citizens uneducated. But, is censorship of the Internet really possible? As a person who goes to

China every summer, I know that it isn’t possible.

The first problem with censoring the Internet while still making access to it available to

citizens is what to block.

China’s filter, also known as the “Great Firewall of China” (Fallows), blocks content about

democracy, Falun Gong, police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech,

Taiwan, Dalai Lama, and blogging sites such as blogger.com and wordpress.com (“Golden Shield

Project”) and has also earned the country a place on Reporters Without Borders’ “Enemies of the

Internet” list (“List of the 13 Internet enemies”).

Iran’s filter blocks access to “political, human rights and women’s sites and weblogs

expressing dissent or deemed to be pornographic and anti-Islamic” (“Internet censorship in Iran”).

The second part of censoring is how to go about doing it. China employs one of the world’s

most advanced information blocking systems. But before I explain how it works, let’s have a little

history lesson, shall we?

In America, when the Internet was built, the architecture was designed to be free of choke

points. That is, information can be easily routed to bypass temporary obstructions. In China, the

Internet “came with choke points built in” (Fallows). There are only a few places where Internet

traffic can enter or exit China. They are in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

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The absence of many exit points makes it so that the government can easily install country-

wide filtration systems at each of these exits. And the Chinese government has. Massive servers

look at each bit of information and compare it to a blacklist of forbidden sites. If the website that a

user requests is blocked, the server ends the connection in several different ways.

The first way the Great Firewall of China employs to block Internet is a DNS block. You can

think of the DNS server as a telephone book. If I wanted to view a website, say google.com, my

computer would ask the DNS server for the proper address. Google, the large website that it is, has

several addresses: 74.125.19.99, 74.125.19.147, 74.125.19.105, 74.125.19.106, 74.125.19.103, and

74.125.19.104.

If the site you want is on the blacklist, the DNS block will give the wrong address for that

site, or not give an address altogether. It’s like a person that can’t call his or her friend because they

don’t have the phone number.

If you manage to get the right address, your computer will send a request to the website

asking for a connection. While the website is sending a reply, surveillance computers in China are

looking over your request. When they find out that the server is supposed to be blocked, a

surveillance computer will fake a “Reset” command to both ends. “Reset” is a perfectly normal

command used when the connection has become unsynchronized. The surveillance computer has

essentially pretended to be both sides of the connection, so that both sides believe that the

connection has been legitimately ended. This is like cutting off the wire between two telephones

while they are in a phone call.

The final way to block a connection in China is the URL keyword block. Even if the website

you want to reach is not blocked, your connection still might be terminated if the surveillance

computers detect any forbidden words in the address of the page you are trying to reach. For

example, even if democracy.com was not blocked and had no content, it would become blocked

because the address contains the word “democracy.”

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This employs the last way to block a connection. The surveillance computers keep on

sending delaying commands in an endless loop. This is like the old joke about keeping an idiot

busy: just write “Please flip over” on both sides of a sheet of paper.

But if you look at all of these techniques, they have one thing in common: they all leave

Chinese Internet users in the dark about what’s going on. In the United Arab Emirates, a country

which also filters Internet, if you request a website that is blocked, you get definitive page about

what’s going on [view the page at http://tr.im/u80s] and have the opportunity to flag the site for

potential unblocking. In China, the connection simply times out. Is it your computer’s problem? Or

maybe your security software is not set up quite right. Maybe it is your ISP’s problem, or maybe the

Internet in your neighborhood is down. A Chinese software engineer who preferred to remain

anonymous for fear of retaliation noted, “The unpredictability of the firewall makes it more

effective. It becomes harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on

guard.” (qtd. in Fallows).

And there is yet another similarity in these techniques the Chinese government takes

advantage of to filter the country’s Internet: how easy they are to bypass. Any user who wants to

gain access to blocked websites knows there are two main ways to do this: using a proxy and

setting up a VPN.

The first way, using a proxy, is easy. All you have to do is visit a special “proxy site” and type

in the website you want to see. The proxy site then relays the website you want to you through

itself, so it appears to the Great Firewall of China that you are simply viewing the proxy site. As long

as the proxy site stays unblocked, you’re fine. However, this method is often slow, inconsistent, and

filled with glitches.

The second way is fancier: setting up your own VPN. “VPN” stands for Virtual Private

Network. It is essentially your own tunnel through the Internet, and all traffic is secured, or

encrypted, so that nobody but the sender and the intended recipient can read it. Your VPN will

connect you to another computer that you own outside of China where the content is not blocked.

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The Chinese government could always just cut off all secure tunnels, but not without major

economic consequences since many Chinese businesses (like banks) rely on these tunnels to keep

customers’ information safe.

Clearly, it is impossible to censor the Internet. China employs numerous ways to try to

accomplish that, but there are many easy ways the average person can circumvent these elaborate

filters. The Internet is just too vast and changes too fast for any censoring system today to keep up.

It’s really easy to make copies of information and then hide those copies, and getting rid of them is

extremely difficult, if not impossible. It’s just not the same as burning physical books.

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Works Cited

Fallows, James. “The Connection Has Been Reset.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic, 26 July 2009. Web.

March 2008.

“Golden Shield Project.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 26 July 2009.

“Internet censorship in Iran.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 26 July 2009.

“Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 26 July

2009.

“List of the 13 Internet enemies.” Reporters Without Borders USA. N.p. 7 November 2006. Web. 26

July 2009.