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Subject: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google?
From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:44:41 -0700
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[a cheeky letter to the editors of the Economist follows, along with the 
article I was commenting on... Rohit]

In your article about Chinese attempts to censor Google last week ("The 
Search Goes On", Sept. 19th), the followup correctly noted that the most 
subversive aspect of Google's service is not its card catalog, which 
merely points surfers in the right direction, but the entire library. By 
maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire World Wide Web, 
if you can get to Google's cache, you can read anything you'd like.

The techniques Chinese Internet Service Providers are using to enforce 
these rules, however, all depend on the fact that traffic to and from 
Google, or indeed almost all public websites, is unencrypted. Almost all 
Web browsers, however, include support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 
encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like. Upgrading to 
SSL makes it effectively impossible for a 'man-in-the-middle' to meddle; 
censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in 
China. The only choice left is to either ban the entire site (range of 
IP addresses), but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in 
the article.

Of course, the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic 
costs real money. If the United States is so concerned about the free 
flow of information, why shouldn't the Broadcasting Board of Governors 
sponsor an encrypted interface to Google, or for that matter, the rest 
of the Web?

To date, public diplomacy efforts have focused on public-sector 
programming for the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, and the like. Just 
imagine if the US government got into the business of subsidizing secure 
access to private-sector media instead. Nothing illustrates the freedom 
of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself -- and most 
of it is already salted away at Google and the Internet Archive project.

On second thought, I can hardly imagine this Administration *promoting* 
the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights. Never mind...

Best,
   Rohit Khare

===========================================================

The search goes on
China backtracks on banning Google—up to a point

Sep 19th 2002 | BEIJING
 From The Economist print edition

IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine, 
is gougou, meaning “doggy”. For the country's fast-growing population of 
Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving 
an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked 
access to Google from Internet service providers in China—apparently 
because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to 
forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been 
restored.

An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More 
sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to 
use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government. 
Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by 
Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for 
Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites.

After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users 
posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move. 
Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet 
providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site 
to far less powerful search engines in China.

Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm, 
BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to 
censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking 
individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be 
filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key 
words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this 
week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on 
Google for Falun Gong—a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China—
usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search 
also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.


