They long ago learned the lesson of the Soviet Union. "This is not a time when the government wants to lose control of the national debate. "This is a particularly sensitive time for the government, one in which the consolidation of power by Xi Jinping is taking on some very sensitive sacred cows, at low and high levels," Auslin said. "The government in China has consistently attempted to monitor the Internet and restrict social media in China, which is growing by leaps and bounds," said Michael Auslin, scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on Asian politics and security. What’s of concern to some analysts now is not only that VPNs are being targeted, but more and more websites are being blocked long-term. Internet censorship in China is nothing new, dating back as far as 1998 and the introduction of what’s often termed "The Great Firewall of China." Second, as happened at Golden Frog, the websites of VPN companies can simply be blocked, preventing users from ever downloading a service in the first place. VPNs are effective but not foolproof, and generally can be blocked in two ways.įirst, governments can block access to the servers associated with a VPN, which is why some VPNs use a constantly shifting set of servers across different continents. This tunnel allows users to generally access the sites they wish while hiding their location and identity. A VPN creates what’s commonly called a "tunnel" - a point-to-point, encrypted connection between your computer and a particular set of servers associated with that VPN service. There are hundreds of VPN services, but overall they all work the same way.
However, the South China Morning Post reports that at a Beijing news conference on January 27, Wen Ku, communication development director at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that new technologies, such as VPNs, make it entirely appropriate for the government to take whatever steps deemed necessary to filter out "inappropriate information" from reaching those online in China. "Such actions run counter to China’s international commitments to protect freedom of expression."
LINK DE ASTRILL IN CHINA OFFLINE
"We remain deeply concerned by Chinese government efforts to restrict the free flow of information both offline and online, including the continued blocking of foreign media websites and search engines," the statement said. State Department urged authorities in Beijing to lift the blocks and open up a freer Internet. Services, he adds, that can easily be monitored, filtered or cut off entirely. "By blocking these tools, the authorities are leaving people no option but to use domestic services." "All of that activity drives Internet users to adopt circumvention tools," he wrote. "Since October, the authorities have launched attacks on Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Apple, putting sensitive user information at risk and in turn making Chinese netizens suspicious of using foreign services. Gmail got blocked completely for the first time in December," he wrote.
"Google got blocked completely last June for the first time. Smith said his group has been monitoring a "rapid ramping up of Internet controls" in China since June of 2014, and that blocking VPNs - which the government has mostly ignored up to this point - is just the next logical step to tighten control. "But they have never done it as extensively as they are doing it now." "The authorities have been doing this for a long time," writes the pseudonymous "Charlie Smith" of the censorship monitoring site in an email to VOA. In response, the company is now using the encrypted HTTPS protocol to help bypass China’s DPI filters. Over at its company blog, Golden Frog, the firm behind VyprVPN, also confirmed the new blocks, saying that it "appears that China is using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to analyze plain-text Web traffic through the Great Firewall." In a Twitter message to its users, Astrill confirmed the blocks, but said only iOS devices, such as iPads and iPhones, appeared to be targeted. In recent years, VPNs have proven very popular in China, not just among free speech activists but with many firms conducting international business from China. VPN’s, or "virtual private networks," are used to bypass Internet censorship and filtering. Users in China of several VPN services, among them VyprVPN, Astrill and StrongVPN, began reporting they were being blocked from accessing those services on the Internet. A recent move by Beijing to block access to several VPN services has angered some Chinese free speech activists who use the tools to get around China’s formidable Internet firewalls.īut now some analysts worry the move may signal a much larger and longer-lasting crackdown that could seriously cramp the Communist nation’s struggling economy.