Difference between revisions of "Circumventing Internet Censorship"

Revision as of 22:11, 12 October 2012

(back to index)

Circumventing Internet censorship is the process of using anti-censorship tools or software to bypass Internet censorship and filters. Certain countries like China and Iran have governments that enforce filters to censor what people can access on the Web, however, there are ways to get around these filters. Websites such as Circumventor.com and Peacefire.org are dedicated to distributing anti-censorship tools to users in these countries so they may roam the Internet freely.

Censorship

Many countries have filtering policies to block users from visiting certain sites used for gaming, entertainment, and social networking. The main reason for doing this is that they are trying to prevent dissidents from posting rebellious, threatening or undesirable material that is critical of those countries. Also, in the United States, public institutions such as schools and libraries are required to use filtering software to block access to certain existing public content such as obscene, pornographic and other materials related to the sexual exploitation of children.

Methods used by the government to censor the Web

Circumvention technologies

Because of the growing global problem of censorship, citizens around the world are fighting to avoid government filters and exercise their first amendment rights to free speech and to access information of their own choosing. The tools, methods, and strategies that are used to by-pass Internet content filtering are referred to as circumvention technologies.

How circumvention works

Users are blocked from connecting directly to the website, so they must connect through some third party site or machine outside of that country that fetches the content and sends it back. It is relatively simple to disable most blocking programs and there are numerous ways to beat a smart filter under a variety of circumstances and by a wide range of users. Usually it takes only four or five steps depending on how the user is accessing the Internet. This is either done through software that is installed on the users computer or the user can manually go to a third party proxy server, to avoid having to use the server on which your smart filter operates. Most proxy sites will allow users to enter their email so they can receive new proxy sites if and when the site gets blocked. Although there are many ways to get access to a blocked site, it is important to find a secure method and to fully understand the technology used for circumvention.

Other tools to defeat censorship

• Cached pages
• Translation services
• RSS Aggregators
• Alternate Domain Names
• Web Accelerator

Developers of circumvention software