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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsnow who wrote (8729)	11/15/2001 2:20:21 PM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 23908

business2.com With Liberty and Justice (and Political Dissent and Pornography) for All How an online privacy startup -- and the CIA -- helps Chinese Web surfers thwart government censors. By David Orenstein, December 2001 Issue Since Chinese citizens first found their way onto the Internet in the late 1990s -- mostly through hundreds of campy new Internet cafes -- their government has scrambled to find ways to keep it at arm's length. Hoping to squelch political dissidents, independent news sources, and pornography, China's ongoing Net crackdown has included arrests, cafe closures, and strategic use of filtering software that can halt naughty Web traffic before it crosses Chinese borders. The government even began programming the nation's routers -- the hardware that directs Internet data from address to address -- to ward off unwanted transmissions. But the massive Chinese bureaucracy never figured on Stephen Hsu. The son of Chinese immigrants, this 35-year-old physics professor currently on leave from the University of Oregon has suddenly become a player in the international game of keep-away -- and in the fast-growing market for online privacy technology. Hsu is CEO of SafeWeb, a small startup in Emeryville, Calif., that makes security software. Among its handful of products is a relatively simple program that has China's censors stumped. Called Triangle Boy, the free program gives anybody who downloads it the ability to secretly lend his or her Internet address to users behind restricted firewalls. That, in turn, hands such users the electronic keys they need to receive unfettered access to the Web. Thousands of Chinese began using the software soon after Hsu released the program last June. By mid-October, Chinese and other international users were viewing more than 300,000 webpages per day through a loose network of "volunteer" computers running the software back in the United States. Hsu freely admits that Triangle Boy isn't completely bulletproof; the Chinese government had some success back in August when it sought to round up some Triangle Boy addresses and block them. Nonetheless, Hsu has drawn serious interest from the CIA, whose Virginia-based venture arm, In-Q-Tel, gave SafeWeb $1 million earlier this year to develop and license the technology. The Voice of America, whose websites are blocked by the Chinese government, is also funding the installation of Triangle Boy machines; already, more than 100 are up and running. The business application of the technology may prove to have a more lasting impact. Hsu's idea is to create a simple virtual private network (VPN) for a company's remote workers, in which a specialized server, functioning like a SafeWeb server, could fetch and encrypt data without the user directly accessing his company's computers. Unlike competing VPNs such as Checkpoint's VPN-1, SafeWeb's would not require employees to run any special client software -- the network could be accessed using any off-the-shelf Web browser. While he prepares a rollout of his VPN package, Hsu doesn't mind playing a part-time role as a populist Web hero -- SafeWeb gets hundreds of e-mails a day from grateful users worldwide. Of course, SafeWeb's growing audience in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria also raises a question: Could Hsu's clever quest to help freedom-loving Web users avoid censorship also help terrorists evade detection? Hsu says no, because his company knows and logs the communications of its users. If the FBI showed up with a subpoena, he'd give up the goods in a second. Plus, there's the not-insignificant fact that one of his company's biggest backers is the CIA. "A terrorist," Hsu says, "would be crazy to use SafeWeb."