Why hasn’t Tor been blocked?

Why hasn’t Tor been blocked? Why can I download Tor? Why can I access the Torpark website but not download Torpark? Why is the main Psiphon website blocked? Why aren’t web-based proxy services like Anonymouse and Proxzee blocked?

I think there is a logical, connected reason that can answer these questions.

If I, a small time blogger, wannabe geek, China expat English teacher, know how to get around the GFW, the Chinese government is well aware of these workarounds too. To bring focus to the questions above, why does the government allow some of these workarounds and try to restrict others?

Let’s start with plain old vanilla Tor. Tor is openly available online at tor.eff.org. The Chinese language version is also freely available. Tor is a tried and true way around the firewall. Tor is also alarmingly easy for the Chinese government to block. By nature of the way that Tor works, Tor servers are, and pretty much must be, publicly known. The Chinese government would have no further to go to find out which IP addresses to block than http://tor.eff.org/download.html.zh-cn. Once they install Vidalia, a GUI that controls Tor, on their Lenovo desktop they can see all the IP addresses they need to block by going to View > Network Map in the menu bar and having a look in the lefthand column in the window. Hell, if I hosted my own blog I could block all Tor users from accessing it if I wanted. It’s that easy.

So why doesn’t the government block Tor? I think it’s because they recognize that a lot of what they block is completely irrelevant to their concerns. The amount of content on Wikipedia.org that the Chinese government fears, for instance, must be astronomically small compared to the total amount of content on Wikipedia. In recognition of this fact, they are allowing Tor as a robust backdoor for determined users.

So why is Torpark blocked from being downloaded? I think this is because the Chinese government does not like the idea of people anonymously using Tor. It is well known that the Chinese government monitors internet usage in China. I think only the incredibly naive would believe that the government doesn’t keep track of who is using Tor and when. Tor can’t stop the government from knowing who is using it, it can only stop the government from knowing what they are using it to view. Torpark, on the other hand, not only stops the government from knowing what the user is viewing, but also stops the government from knowing who the user is, because the user can take a USB thumbdrive to any internet connected computer in the country and browse and be gone in a matter of minutes leaving behind little to no physical trace and no electronic trace of their identity.

And then there is psiphon. Psiphon servers, unlike Tor servers, do not need to be publicly known, and would be very hard for the government to track down and block. The government most likely fears psiphon due to the lack of control it presents the government with and has blocked the main psiphon website, as well as mypshiphon.com, where people can request accounts to use psiphon servers, for this reason. (At least, these sites have been blocked for me for the past couple weeks. If anyone living in China would like to verify or refute this paragraph please leave a comment.)

Which leaves us with web based proxies such as Anonymouse.org, Proxzee.com, and a host of websites listing proxy addresses, such as Proxy.org, Public Proxy Servers and CNProxy. I think that the government doesn’t block these because they do not, in fact, offer strong anonymity, though they do offer an efficient backdoor to blocked sites, and if the government really wanted to know what people using these services were looking for it would be a fairly trivial matter.

In conclusion, I think that the Chinese government is not concerned with determined users circumventing the GFW for non-threatening purposes, like reading The Weifang Radish , and allow certain backdoors for this very reason, but try to restrict the backdoors over which they feel they have little to no control.

Tags GFW, Internet Censorship Circumvention

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