Entry 1 - Technological consciousness: breaking the Great "Firewall" of China

The Great Firewall of China: Understanding the reasons for its existence

After the 2015 crackdown on Internet freedom in China, more than 715 netizens tried to breach the powerful firewall and gain access to the free internet. Internet censorship comes at a time when the Chinese government faces increasingly problematic social tensions within the country. With 300 movements ranging from simple protests to full-scale revolt, China is faced with social instability that can potentially impact China's fast-pace development and project of global expansion. According to an article published by POV, a cinema channel provided by PBS, "access to The New York Times and Bloomberg L.P. websites has been blocked in China since both organizations released the net Photo Gallery worth of high-ranking Chinese government officials in 2012. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are also blocked, and Skype are monitored" (POV, 2013). With a strictly enforced Internet censorship, netizens use microblogs like 微博 (Weibo) and messaging apps such as 微信 (WeChat).

How does the firewall work?

The firewall is a part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting outward communication. It "typically establishes a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another outside network, such as the Internet, that is assumed not to be secure or trusted" (Wikipedia, "Firewall Computing"). The graph shown below is a representation of the way in which a firewall can block certain information from the user (NetworkingReviews.com). A DMZ network, or demilitarized zone is a subnetwork that "contains and exposes an organization's external-facing services to the Internet" (Wikipedia, "DMZ network").  

Finding ways to bypass the firewall

There exist several ways to bypass the Great Firewall of China.

• Lantern and FreeBrowser: softwares that hide Internet traffic from the Great Firewall. Funded by the U.S. Government, they are tools that are effective in countering Chinese censorship. Today, over 280,000 Chinese netizens use Lantern every month. Chinese citizens make up about 80 percent of Lantern’s total users (The Daily Dot, 2015). 

• "The dark net" (Tor anonymity network): Tor is a free software that allows its users to increase their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor secretly routes the system’s Internet traffic over several places on the Internet, thus hiding the real source of the communication, and securing personal identity (Ashutosh KS, Hongkiat). However, the network is slow and unstable in China.

• VPN (Virtual Private Network): A VPN extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network (Wikipedia, "Virtual Private Network").