News: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"

[Tim May]

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 09:44 AM, David Honig wrote:

> At 09:01 AM 8/30/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> This report says the U.S. Gov't. has plans to make "SafeWeb," the Web
>> proxy company it helped fund through the CIA, available to Chinese
>> citizens who want to bypass their government's censorship.
>>
>> So, what happens when Iran decides to finance systems in the U.S. to
>> bypass U.S.G. censorship (e.g., of talk by freedom fighters)? Or when
>> Denmark finances a system to bypass crackdowns on teen erotica in the
>> U.S.? And so on.
>
> Yep.
>
> Note that its not all altruism/subversion; its also intelligence, the
> USG gets to monitor what the Chinese middle class are really interested 
> in.
>
> Beyond what the spooks already know.


And I have to wonder just how safe/untraceable SafeWeb is. If it's safe 
enough to protect Chinese dissidents against torture and execution, then 
it's safe enough to protect freedom fighters in America, Ireland, and 
ZOG-Occupied Palestine.

On the other hand, maybe it's got a "Chinese bit," a Chinese trap door. 
After all, if it were truly safe/untraceable, with good crypto, then 
that same system could and would be used by Chinese apparatchniks 
(whatever the spelling) and PLA officers. The CIA wouldn't want that, 
now would they?

Still, the "approval" of the U.S. Government of tools for freedom 
fighters should push the public debate a bit. Twits who argue that there 
are never any reasons for "hiding" see the reasons in front of them, 
laid out by the U.S.G. itself.

(Not that any of this is at all new to anyone who has spent more than 5 
minutes thinking about the issue. The history of man is the history of 
groups oppressing other groups, of satraps raping their people, of 
purges of entire ethnic groups. Anyone repeating the "what have you got 
to hide?" canard is not worth convincing.)


This relates to the sweet spot argument. The "dollar ghetto" I talked 
about, where privacy providers yammer about protecting Web surfers from 
Pillsbury tracking their cookie preferences with cookies, so to speak, 
is just not very interesting or lucrative.

Protecting Chinese dissidents from arrest and execution is pretty far to 
the right on that X-axis of "Value of Untraceability" I outlined.

This was the original goal of ZKS, of course. (And of course of networks 
of digital mixes, of which the early Cypherpunks remailers were just an 
experimental instance of.)

Alas, the marketing of such "dissident-grade untraceability" is 
difficult. Partly because anything that is dissident-grade is also 
pedophile-grade, money launderer-grade, freedom fighter-grade, 
terrorist-grade, etc.

--Tim May