Colin Perkel
Sun
TORONTO — Citizens of countries such as China and Iran are about to be handed a powerful Canadian-made tool designed to undermine authoritarian efforts at stifling the free flow of information.
Called Psiphon, it’s a small computer program that allows people in non-democratic places to beat the local thought police and access forbidden websites at minimal personal risk.
“All we’re doing is allowing people to access the Internet at a standard that’s provided in uncensored locations like Canada,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab Project at the University of Toronto.
“We wanted to make it something that authorities would have a difficult time discovering.”
The concept is simple.
People in uncensored locations such as Canada install Psiphon on their home computers. The program is free, easy to set up, and small at about 1.5 megabytes.
They then send connection information by e-mail or phone, along with a user name and password, to people they trust in the countries subject to censorship.
The person in the foreign country connects through a secure, encrypted connection to the uncensored computer and surfs the Web without hindrance.
More than 40 countries are now engaged in Internet censorship. China, for example, rigorously blocks access to information on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as well as to other politically sensitive sites, with what’s been dubbed the Great Firewall.
The Psiphon service can be downloaded from the Internet at http://psiphon.civisec.org.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
