Re: Fighting the cybercensor.

[Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu>]

At 01:50 PM 1/21/97 -0500, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker wrote:
>Mission:
>
>Singapore and China are blocking certain net groups. I think
>this is a bad thing, question is how can we stop it? The Web
>was conceived as offering despots and dictators a choice 
>between remaining in the dark ages and allowing freedom of
>speech. Blocking and filtering schemes threaten this ideal.
>
>
>Requirements:
>
>A scheme which makes blocking of individual IP addresses 
>impractical.
>
>
...
>2c) Some crypto hack I can't quite work out (hence the post to
>cypher punks). I can phrase the challenge more compactly though.
>We have two sets of opposed groups A and M. The A group wish to
>establish a continued conversation with groups B and C. M is 
>willing to permit communication with group B but not C. Whenever
>M discovers that a member of group B is willing to act on behalf 
>of group C, M transfers that member to the C group.
>
>The problem is to keep A's channels of communication open despite
>the efforts of M for very large group sizes. 
>
...
>
>Comments? If people are willing to work on this I can provide 
>some facilities and act as a media contact.
>
I believe that I heard a suggestion here once involving accepting Vulis's
posts, all of them, but only distributing them to Vulis.
I have also heard, on a web-based bulliten board (please excuse the
spelling), about setting up a proxy for the CDA supporters routing all of
thier requests to a VAX loaded with only "clean" stuff, either by
engineering it for them, or routing all of thier communications to an
existing "clean" site.
The idea here is, if the government doesn't know what sites to block, i.e.
thier in office checks of said site checked out but everyone gets a
different look, they can't block them.  To begin blocking proxies, they
would have to get spies in the population to tell them where the "trash" is,
or pay a bounty for every such site, which they would then have to figure
out how to verify.  This would require spies on our part as well.  Ones to
say that so-and-so citizen has been informing to the government so that the
operators could put that citizen on the government list, the list of people
to give the filtered "wholesome" feed to.
Such an effort would require a great amount of effort and would probably be
best suited to the EFF or other existing freedom protection organization.
The setup would be similair to a "pirate broadcast" in the views of the
government and would thus be best operated from safe shores.
The spy ring would be simple.
A e-mail address or other semi-secure drop-off point would be maintained for
snitches.  This address would be well advertised on the board, a SINGLE system.
When a tattler is fingered by a fellow tattler, the government side tattler
is baited with highly inflammatory, but mostly worthless, articles about the
government.  If the site is blocked, the informer is blocked.
There are several kinks to work out.
The single site would be easier to maintain, having "disposible" repeater
sites which the government can see to block.  Thus the main site would never
be seen unshielded, though if it was, it wouldn't mean anything.