The New York Times reports that China will start requiring censorship software on PCs. One interesting quote stands out:
Zhang Chenming, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, a company that helped create Green Dam, said worries that the software could be used to censor a broad range of content or monitor Internet use were overblown. He insisted that the software, which neutralizes programs designed to override China’s so-called Great Firewall, could simply be deleted or temporarily turned off by the user. “A parent can still use this computer to go to porn,” he said.
In this post, I’d like to consider the different capabilities that software like this could give to the Chinese authorities, without getting too much into their motives.
Firstly, and most obviously, this software allows the authorities to do filtering of web sites and network services that originate inside or outside of the Great Firewall. By operating directly on a client machine, this filter can be aware of the operations of Tor, VPNs, and other firewall-evading software, allowing connections to a given target machine to be blocked, regardless of how the client tries to get there. (You can’t accomplish “surgical” Tor and VPN filtering if you’re only operating inside the network. You need to be on the end host to see where the connection is ultimately going.)
Software like this can do far more, since it can presumably be updated remotely to support any feature desired by the government authorities. This could be the ultimate “Big Brother Inside” feature. Not only can the authorities observe behavior or scan files within one given computer, but every computer now because a launching point for investigating other machines reachable over a local area network. If one such machine were connected, for example, to a private home network, behind a security firewall, the government software could still scan every other computer on the same private network, log every packet, and so forth. Would you be willing to give your friends the password to log into your private wireless network, knowing their machine might be running this software?
Perhaps less ominously, software like this could also be used to force users to install security patches, to uninstall zombie/botnet systems, and perform other sorts of remote systems administration. I can’t imagine the difficulty in trying to run the Central Government Bureau of National Systems Administration (would they have a phone number you could call to complain when your computer isn’t working, and could they fix it remotely?), but the technological base is now there.
Of course, anybody who owns their own computer will be able to circumvent this software. If you control your machine, you can control what’s running on it. Maybe you can pretend to be running the software, maybe not. That would turn into a technological arms race which the authorities would ultimately fail to win, though they might succeed in creating enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt to deter would-be circumventors.
This software will also have a notable impact in Internet cafes, schools, and other sorts of “public” computing resources, which are exactly the sorts of places that people might go when they want to hide their identity, and where the authorities could have physical audits to check for compliance.
Big Brother is watching.
Leave a Reply