Golden Shield

1
Golden Shield
As told by Chris Anderson
Jingjing
See Why the internet in China is less fun
See also Why I am not an art major
This is from a template
2
Golden Shield is?

• A giant program to track, filter and contain
  dissent
  
• Includes anything inconvenient, radical or
  treasonous to the Communist Party
  
• Distributors / purveyors of information can be
  jailed without trial / held indefinitely
  
• Also known as the Hulk Smash approach to
  censorship

3
Say what? A timeline

• The Great Firewall of China
• 1994 First mainland net access
• 1998 China Democracy Party (CDP) loves the
  internet
  
• 1998 Communist Party pushes for the beginning of
  Golden Shield
  
• 2002 By this point 80 Million USD had been
  spent
  
• 2002 declaration Old style censorship is being
  replaced with a massive, ubiquitous architecture
  of surveillance the Golden Shield. Ultimately,
  the aim is to integrate a gigantic online
  database with an all-encompassing surveillance
  network incorporating speech and face
  recognition, closed-circuit television, smart
  cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance
  technologies
• Future plans include full 24/7 camera
  surveillance and face recognition covering cities

4
GS Stage 1

• All citizens are registered with the government
  (pretty standard fare)?
  
• A citizen must register all personal information
  with their isp and local police within 30 days of
  obtaining 'net access
  
• ISPs must maintain detailed logs of all
  activities (tracked via ip) for up to 60 days for
  each user

5
GS Stage 1 cont

• All content providers must register all bulletin
  board systems, forums and means of communication
  via their services with the government (Goodbye
  Somethingawful and craigslist)?
• Content providers are responsible for filtering,
  censoring and reporting their own content/BBS
  systems for fear of being held accountable
  
• For these reasons many users use Cybercafes

6
Cyberwutzits?

• Cafe with computers, pretty straightforward
• Owners are required to register with the
  government
  
• Cafes must record access logs and customer
  identities for 60 days
  
• Software must be run to block pornographic and
  subversive material
  
• Many Cyber cafes are illegal because of this

7
What else is banned?

• Illegal to engage in subversive activities,
  distribute state secrets, take part in criminal
  activities, transmit information pertaining to
  racism, treason, distorting the truth and
  spreading rumors
• Users may not alter network settings, function or
  information on public networks.
  
• Can result in large fines or jail time

8
Filtering

• IP blocks
• DNS Poisoning
• Not much love for Academic sites (RIP Harvard)?
• URL filtering (aka does that search contain a
  naughty word?)?
  
• I hope you don't need to write a report on Tibet,
  Tienanmen Square or the Falun Gong
  
• RSS is bad, really. Not allowed

9
There's a snake in mah boot (snakes poison, get
it?)?

• DNS poisoning is another common method of
  filtering
  
• Simply resolve addresses to nothing, or have them
  redirect to mainland Chinese providers
  (Google/Yahoo have been victims of this)?

10
Transporting contraband

• Basic packet filtering is applied to common
  protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP
  
• Same sort of word based filters as in the url
  filtering

11
In Soviet Hong Kong, Internet Filters You?

• Former imperial colonies are not subject to these
  methods of filtering
  
• Macau and Hong Kong, as well as any other
  imperialist colonies I didn't know exist

12
GINORMOUS FLAWS

• Encrypted traffic is NOT filtered

This is from google image search
This is still from a template
13
Getting around it

• Freenet (They can't jail all of us, right?
  ...right?)?
  
• Socks5 tunnels (ssh -D 1080 dissident_at_some-non-chi
  nese-host.com)?
  
• Virtual Private Networks (VPN)?
• Tor (Onion routing, but it won't make you cry)?
• Proxy servers (Though many public proxy servers
  are blacklisted via IP)?
  
• Anonymizer.com is not blocked for some reason

14
That elephant in the room hitting on your sister

• China has received a lot of flak for its
  draconian filtering practices
  
• Western media source blocks have been removed as
  China has tried to gain more of a Western
  Presence
  
• Times.com and wikipedia.com are favorites for
  being blocked, but were restored upon complaints
  
• 2008 Olympics are forcing the government to relax
  filters so that foreign media will be able to
  cover events