Reporters Without Borders have launched the world's first Anti-Censorship Shelter in Paris for use by foreign journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are refugees or just passing through as a place where they can learn how to circumvent Internet censorship, protect their electronic communications and maintain their anonymity online.

At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information, Reporters Without Borders said.

Never before have there been so many netizens in prison in countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran for expressing their views freely online, the press freedom organisation added. Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data.

Reporters Without Borders and the communications security firm XeroBank have formed a partnership in order to make high-speed anonymity services, including encrypted email and web access, available free of charge to those who user the Shelter.

By connecting to XeroBank through a Virtual Private Network (VPN), their traffic is routed across its gigabit backbone network and passes from country to country mixed with tens of thousands of other users, creating a virtually untraceable high-speed anonymity network.

This network will be available not only to users of the Shelter in Paris but also to their contacts anywhere in the world and to all those – above all journalists, bloggers and human rights activists – who have been identified by Reporters Without Borders. They will be able to connect with the XeroBank service by means of access codes and secured, ready-to-use USB flash drives that can be provided on request.

XeroBank is a communications security firm that has cornered the market on one of the rarest commodities in the world: online privacy. It specializes in communication solutions that protect its clients from all eavesdroppers.

The best-known free encryption and censorship circumvention software is also available to users of the Shelter, along with manuals and Wiki entries on these issues. A multimedia space is planned for journalists and Internet users who want to film and send videos.

The Shelter will eventually also have a dedicated website for hosting banned content. Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk's reports on the pollution of Egypt's lakes, which are banned in his country, and articles that are banned in Italy by its new phone-tap law will all have a place in what is intended to be a refuge for those who still being censored.

The Shelter is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. Anyone wanting to use it should make a reservation by sending an email to shelter@rsf.org.

A browser that bypasses internet censors has become the most popular way to access the Internet in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian state where sites critical of the government are often blocked.

The Norwegian developed Opera browser made by Opera Software has increased its market share sharply in the ex-Soviet state since it began to allow downloads of compressed web pages via a server outside the country, a feature designed to speed browsing.

The Opera browser is now the most popular in the country with a market share of 32%, beating out rival products from Google, Microsoft and Apple, according to statistics for March from Web analytics firm StatCounter.

The new version of Opera introduced last year, Opera 10, allows users to view otherwise inaccessible Web pages using its Opera Turbo feature designed to speed up browsing over slow connections.

Kazakhstan introduced a law last year allowing local courts to block access to Web sites whose content has been deemed illegal, a step that human rights groups say amounts to censorship.

Some of the most popular blogging websites such as Livejournal.com and Google-run Blogger.com are now inaccessible to most of Kazakhstan's 3.2 million Internet users.

Media Guardian's Innovator of the year is Austin Heap who helped create Haystack, a system for beating Iranian web censorship

Austin Heap followed the last Iranian results on Twitter, and recognised that Iran's censorship had stepped up. He sent a tweet to fellow computer geeks and made contact with Daniel Colascione, based in Buffalo, New York.

The pair worked for 72 hours without sleep to deconstruct the filtering methods of the Iranian telecommunications agency. Then they created Haystack, a censorship workaround that directed requests from computers in Iran through servers elsewhere in the world, hidden in a stream of innocent-looking traffic. They also devised technology to protect the identities of Haystack's users. All this made it possible for people on the ground in Iran to reach blocked sites safely and securely, to organise inside the country and communicate with the world.

Haystack immediately turned Heap himself into a target: the Iranian government blocked his blog, and he received death threats via Twitter and even over the phone. At times he required 24-hour police protection.

Haystack, funded by voluntary donations, landed him an invitation to the US state department, and audiences with political parties in the UK including the Labour party. As much as we've tried to innovate with technology, he said, during a recent trip to London, I think the real innovators of the year are the people with their phones, the people on the streets, the people in Iran and the other people around the world who are standing up for the human rights that they deserve. We can give them the tools, but without the people, the tools are useless.

Heap continues to work with Haystack, and has a list of countries, from Australia to Afghanistan, that he will be tackling next.

From haystacknetwork.com

Haystack is a new program designed to provide unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran. The software package is compatible with Windows, Mac and Unix systems, and specifically targets the Iranian government's web filtering mechanisms.

Haystack is not an ordinary proxy system. It employs a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide users' real Internet traffic inside a continuous stream of innocuous-looking requests. In addition to providing anonymity, Haystack uses strong cryptography, ensuring that even if users' traffic is detected, it cannot be read. Trying to find and decipher our users' traffic amidst all the other traffic on the web really is like trying to find a needle in the proverbial Haystack.

A basement in the gray, Gothic heart of the University of Toronto is home to the CSI of cyberspace. We are doing free expression forensics, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab.

Deibert and his team of academics and students investigate in real time governments and companies that restrict what we see and hear on the Internet. They are also trying to help online journalists and bloggers slip the shackles of censorship and surveillance. Deibert is a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a project of the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. ONI tracks the blocking and filtering of the Internet around the globe.

We are testing in 71 countries, says Deibert. We are testing all the time. We are the technical hub of ONI.

We started out in 2002 with China, said Jillian York, project coordinator for Berkman. The work evolved, and then with Cuba we cracked it. However, as Citizen Lab and Berkman gained expertise and resources so did the censors they battled.

We are now onto third-generation controls, York said of Internet censorship. The first generation was simple filtering, IP blocking in China, for example. The second generation was surveillance, which ranged from placing spies or closed-circuit cameras in Internet cafés to installing tracking software on computers themselves. The third generation controls combine all the above. We see it in China, Syria, and Burma. It's a very broad approach, York laments.

ONI's research and public awareness-raising provides just one weapon in the increasingly sophisticated armory that bloggers need to deploy against government encroachment. Some free-speech campaigners engage across a wide battlefront, taking on authorities in Tunisia or Pakistan, for example, to keep blogging and video platforms open. Others, like Deibert, devise tools for an individual user to tunnel beneath a firewall or slip past a digital spy undetected. He helped develop Psiphon, a free, open source application that channels data through a network of proxies to circumvent censorship. Anyone can use it. It's fast and there's nothing to download onto your computer for the Internet police to find, said Deibert.

It's a game of digital cat-and-mouse with authorities hunting down circumvention nodes, and Psiphon switching to an alternate as soon as a node is compromised. Citizen Lab launched Psiphon in December 2006 but did not have the resources to develop it further. So in May this year, Deibert and another ONI founder, Rafal Rohozinski, spun it off as a commercial enterprise. It is still free to users but charges companies to deliver their blocked content. Clients so far include the BBC and the U.S. government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors. Social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to Psiphon and other circumvention tools like Tor, spreading node connection information among bloggers and journalists. This was evident during the media crackdown in Iran that followed the disputed June presidential elections, when Twitter proved difficult to shut down.

Chinese authorities has begun blocking the intermediate nodes and servers, directory services on the basis of the Tor anonymizing their IP addresses.

In the columns of Tor's blog can be read that the great firewall (GFW) is blocking communication with about 80% of the Tor node. Author of note also admitted that it was expected this turn of events.

Already in the middle of last year, China blocked Tor website. Therefore, the operator of the website and its creators tried to be the protection of the new Tor servers, to prevent the Chinese authorities to get into the list of public nodes - the intention is apparently failed.

Although the establishment of an anonymous connection is still possible using the remaining 20% of the nodes, but such an operation takes a long time. Author of this blog entry advises users that you run a Tor private goals (so-called bridge relays) if they want to help Chinese colleagues. This kind of goals do not appear on public lists, and thus difficult to find and block.

The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.

The feed over email (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.

The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google Inc, Microsoft Corp's Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.

We have people testing it in China and Iran, said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments.

New software aiming to circumvent web censorship in the Middle East and beyond was recently launched at a summit on blogging in Cairo. The tool "Al-Kasir" - meaning "the circumventer" in Arabic, is now available for public use in its first test version.

Developer Walid Al-Saqaf, a Sweden-based Yemeni, said he is using the device to work around government web censorship.

The tool also performs periodic checks on censored sites to track whether they remain constantly blocked or if the filtering is lifted at times. Meanwhile, users of the program can report information about filtering and blocking in their respective countries.

While primarily intended for use in Arab countries like Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen where web censorship is widely imposed, Al-Kasir can be used in any country.

Al-Saqaf explained the process of using the tool to access blocked websites.

When you open the program, you will get information about your ISP, country, etc. If someone using the same ISP as you had already reported through Al-Kasir about a blocked website and that website got approved (by the moderators), then it will be accessible by you. If not, then you could report a blocked website and then it will be moderated and if approved, it will be accessible by you as well as everyone else using Al-Kasir and accessing the Internet through your ISP.

Al-Saqaf told MENASSAT that the program only circumvents human-moderated websites that have been blocked by governments due to political or informational reasons: In other words, the program allows access to human rights and activist websites, political websites, discussion groups, and social groups. It was a tough decision to make but it was necessary because otherwise, the bandwidth and the legal constraints would be costly.

Global Voices Advocacy announce that the third update to the Anonymous Blogging guide with Wordpress & Tor is now available online!

The guide outlines several methods of protecting one’s identity in order to avoid retaliation and can considerably reduce the risks that a blogger’s identity will be linked to his or her online writings through technical means.

In order to provide you with the most up to date information on how to blog anonymously, the guide has been updated once again so that all the tips are compatible with Tor’s recent updates.

This update introduces the Tor Browser Bundle, an open source version of a portable browser developed by Tor Project, that lets you use Tor with zero install. Tor Browser is a great pre-configured Tor bundle with self contained Mozilla Firefox browser for USB drives or any other portable media (SD Card, Hard Drives, Compact Flash Card).

If you’re going to pursue your blogging activities primarily from shared computers (like cybercafe computers) or if you’re unable to install software on a computer, please follow the steps on how to run Tor Browser Bundle without needing to install any software.

The update includes tips on how to acquire the Tor bundle if your internet connection blocks access to the Tor website. It also includes tips on what to do if you encounter problems connecting to the Tor network.

Please link to it, download it and help disseminate this important information. Feel free as well to help us translating the guide into your own language.

Herdict Web crowd sources reports from users to discover, in real time, what users around the world are experiencing in terms of internet website blocking.

Herdict is a named coned from joining ‘herd’ and ‘verdict.’

Using Herdict Web, anyone anywhere can report websites as accessible or inaccessible. Herdict Web aggregates reports in real time, permitting participants to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem, giving them a better sense of potential reasons for why a site is inaccessible. Trends can be viewed over time, by site and by country.

Herdict Web is the brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It) and is part of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Scroogle is a web service that disguises the Internet address of users who want to run Google searches anonymously.

Scroogle also gives users the option of having all communication between their computer and the search page be SSL encrypted.

The tool was created by Google critic Daniel Brandt who was concerned about Google collecting information on users, and set up Scroogle to filter searches through his servers before going to Google: I don’t save the search terms and I delete all my logs every week. So even if the feds come around and ask me questions I don’t know the answer because I don’t have the logs any more. I don’t associate the search terms with the user’s address at all, so I can’t even match those up.

Traffic has doubled every year and as of December 2007, Scroogle had passed 100,000 visitors a day.

Besides anonymous searches, the tool allows users to perform Google searches without receiving Google advertisements. There is support for 28 languages, and the tool is available as a browser plug-in.

Regular web users can now access anonymously-published websites that are masked by Tor's hidden services thanks to a new tool called tor2web.com.

The tool, created by former Reddit developer Aaron Swartz and WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith, enables people to view these hidden websites (designated by the .onion domain suffix) without diving into Tor, which can be a pain for casual surfers.

The creators hope that the existence of tor2web will encourage more organizations to publish content anonymously through Tor, now that such a heavy access restriction has been lifted.

The Tor project is most famous as a tool that allows Internet surfers to access websites privately and anonymously from within the onion router. Put simply, it works by passing your requests to another node that acts as a middleman between you and a website, which in turn passes the request onto other nodes, and so on. Every step is encrypted except for the final exit node to the content server connection, and the network is run almost entirely by volunteers.

Tor's hidden services allow web publishers to publish content anonymously so that law enforcement (and general snoopers) can't detect where the information is coming from. The only problem with publishing websites under Tor is that they can only be accessed from within Tor, meaning that the available audience at any given time is infinitesimally small compared to the overall Internet-using population. This is the problem that Swartz and Griffith hope to address with tor2web.

Free application GPass helps you bypass censorship and blocked web sites by tunneling network traffic through encrypted proxy servers.

After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface.

 GPass will launch the program with all the necessary tunneling in place.

GPass is easy to use, and requires no setup on your part unless you want to do a little tweaking. It's also impressively fast for a proxy—it appears to choose the proxy server with the quickest response rate when it starts up.

We've mentioned other tools for accessing blocked web sites with previously mentioned Hotspot Shield—whether they're blocked by location or by a corporate filter—but GPass looks like an excellent ad-free alternative. If you give it a try, let's hear how it worked for you in the comments.

The Advocacy 2.0 Guide (Tools for Digital Advocacy) describes some of the best techniques and tools that digital activists - and others who wish to learn from this subject - can use as part of their online advocacy campaigns. While our previous guide (Blog for a Cause!) focused on the effective use of blogs as an advocacy tool, this guide will explore creative uses of other web 2.0 applications.

Our goal is to:

• Aggregate web 2.0 tools for advocacy
• Provide detailed instructions on how to use them
• Highlight successful experiences of web 2.0 activism by local digital activists around the world..
• Inspire other activists to adopt these strategies in ways that serve their specific goals and needs.

From “Geo-bombing” to “multi-blogging” and Twitter to “mash-ups”, we explore the field of digital advocacy, helping activists reach out to audiences they may never have reached before.

We are releasing the first from a series of Advocacy 2.0 Guides that will show you how to use the web 2.0 as an advocacy tool:

...Read full article

Internet users trapped behind China's so-called "Great Firewall" are finding ways to scale the wall, but experts say software programs that allow unfettered access to the web are often cumbersome and difficult to find from inside the country.

China's efforts to restrict access to the Internet have faced renewed criticism during the Beijing Olympics, especially after international journalists discovered their access was still affected despite earlier promises by Olympic officials.

We face so many shared global problems right now, you need some kind of global communications medium through which citizens around the world can communicate and share ideas, says Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.

Two years ago the Citizen Lab released a program called Psiphon, which allows users in countries such as China and Iran to circumvent their governments' Internet censorship. The free software uses computers outside the censoring country - known as proxies - to fetch web pages and send them back over encrypted connections.

Groups like the Citizen Lab and Reporters Without Borders have produced how-to guides for getting around Internet censorship.

Some techniques are relatively simple but not very effective, such as using saved or cached pages on search engines. Other methods are better but more complex, such as "tunnelling" software that hides content inside other forms of Internet traffic.

Another popular option is a browser called Tor, which also uses proxies.

A group of German programmers have created what they call the Freedom Stick, a self-contained version of the Tor browser on a USB drive that the group distributed to German journalists heading to the Beijing Games.

And with a little money and technical know-how, just about anyone can pay for what's called a virtual private network located outside the country, which essentially uses the same technique as Tor and Psiphon.

There are many options for Internet users in China and other countries to get around web censorship, says German IT security expert Sebastian Wolfgarten, but access to the software and information about how to use it are often blocked themselves.

Wolfgarten rented a server in China two years ago so he could browse from a China-based connection and examine how exactly the Great Firewall works: It's really pervasive, and from a technical point of view it's very well done.

He says the filtering works on multiple levels, including: restricting sites based on their web addresses and domain names; using technology to cut off and freeze connections accessing banned content; and requiring search engines to tailor results if they want to operate in China.

Suggested website for further reading

• www.citizenlab.org
• chinesewall.ccc.de/freedomstick-en.html
• www.torproject.org
• www.rsf.org

Reporters Without Borders is making a new version of its Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents available to bloggers.

The handbook offers practical advice and techniques on how to create a blog, make entries and get the blog to show up in search engine results. It gives clear explanations about blogging for all those whose online freedom of expression is subject to restrictions, and it shows how to sidestep the censorship measures imposed by certain governments, with a practical example that demonstrates the use of the censorship circumvention software Tor.

The leaders of authoritarian countries are becoming more and suspicious of bloggers, these men and women who, although not journalists, publish news and information online and who, worse still, often tackle subjects the so-called traditional media dare not cover. In some countries, blogs have become an important new source of news. It is to protect this source that Reporters Without Borders has updated its handbook.