Hacktivists' aid human-rights fight, bit by byte
Firewall busters outfox tyranny

By Karen Brandon
Tribune national correspondent
Published November 17, 2002

LOS ANGELES -- A hybrid has arrived at the intersection of human-rights activism and the derring-do of computer hacking.
It is called hacktivism.
Across the globe, elite computer experts with some of the world's most technically innovative minds are setting their sights on ways to help human-rights causes.

Armed with what may become one of the most important weapons in the struggle for human rights--computer code--the "hacktivists" are trying to give activists electronic ways to circumvent government surveillance and information management.

The devices, the Information Age equivalent to assumed identities and messages strapped to a homing pigeon's leg, are aimed at enabling human-rights workers to send and receive electronic messages free of government monitoring, to store computer data without fear that authorities will confiscate the information and to find chinks in the barriers governments have erected to block access to Internet sites they find objectionable.

For example, when the Chinese government shut the door to the use of the search engine Google earlier this year, a hacktivist devised a way to reopen it in less than a day.
"In the public perception, the term hacker equals criminal," said one computer expert who wished to be referred to by his computer handle, Oxblood Ruffin.

Oxblood Ruffin three years ago founded Hacktivismo.com, an organization of several dozen hackers who consider themselves a technological brain trust to further human rights. "We are the most rabid pro-democracy activists in the world. We are much more interested in the hack part" of hacktivism, he said, "which is to say we are much more interested in the technology. But we see that as the prime catalyst for change."

This summer, the group introduced Camera/Shy software, available without charge to democracy activists. The software gives users access to banned content by hiding digital messages in pictures. One budding project using the technology aims to make biblical passages available in Chinese.

Tiananmen Square recalled
The group is waiting for federal approval to distribute Six/Four System, a computer protocol whose name is taken from the date of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Six/Four would let activists enter a private electronic suite or tunnel to use e-mail, chat and browse the Internet.

"We are essentially offering the same technology banks would have to democracy advocates," Oxblood Ruffin said. Advocates are just beginning to tap the capacity of new technology. For instance, the Voice of America, whose radio broadcasts are jammed by China, now sends daily news report into the country through e-mail.

Though Beijing's electronic firewall is notorious, a technology called Anonymizer disguises the identity of the Voice of America as the source of the e-mail, letting it slip through to millions of computers every day.

"There's not much you can do to get around the radio jamming," said Ken Berman, program manager for Internet anti-censorship efforts for the International Broadcasting Bureau, which administers and engineers the Voice of America. On the Internet, by contrast, "It's a cat-and-mouse game," he said.

Using Freenet-China, software created this year, people in China have been able to get to banned sites and documents, including government documents on the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Web sites for the outlawed religious movement Falun Gong, according to Bill Xia, president and founder of Dynamic Internet Technology. Xia, a Chinese immigrant, said the company's focus is developing software to get around Chinese government censorship.

In Guatemala, where human-rights activists have been alarmed by an epidemic of thefts of their computers and the data they hold, some organizations are learning encryption technology as protection.

"We have had to safeguard information so even if it's stolen, it's of no use to anybody except us," said Susie Kemp, external counsel for the Center for Human Rights Legal Action, which represents witnesses in 22 of the country's indigenous communities who have accused eight high-ranking government officials, including former presidents and the head of the ruling political party, of genocide and war crimes.

The technology holds potential for safeguarding material from being lost, not even necessarily to the prying of government. Martus.org, named for the Greek word for witness, is being designed to serve as an electronic "human-rights bulletin system," to help groups gather and collect data.

The "pseudo proxy," the technical instrument that allowed Chinese access to Google despite the government's blockade, was devised by members of Citizen Lab, a group of technology experts formed in June at the University of Toronto who are developing free software and computing tools for global civic activism.

Breaking censorship
"Now that the hacktivists are turning their attention to these countries, it's becoming very difficult for them to maintain a level of censorship on the Internet," said Ron Deibert, the teacher who directs Citizen Lab. "I think it shows how people who are technically savvy and have a political cause can keep one step ahead of these large cumbersome states such as China.

"The next step is to see what technologies are being used to do the blocking," Deibert said. He and others say increasing evidence suggests that much of the technology that repressive regimes use to block Internet access and scrutinize private communication is coming from corporations in the West. A Citizen Lab project, for instance, identified a router made by Cisco Systems Inc. as one used by China to block access to what it considered objectionable sites.

"People don't realize we're exporting censorship," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group in San Francisco.
In addition, he said, the technology that holds potential for human-rights and democracy advocates faces challenges on two fronts.

The same kind of technology challenged in the hotly contested Napster case, involving distribution of copyrighted music, could benefit human-rights groups seeking to share data, Tien said. These networks have been "demonized as instruments of copyright infringement in the public mind," he said, but they have potential for free speech.
And the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, which the United States has signed but not yet ratified, authorizes government surveillance powers that easily could be used by totalitarian regimes seeking to monitor democracy advocates.

Red flag on governments
"In the name of fighting cybercrime, you say that national governments get to do all kinds of surveillance," Tien said. "What would Hitler have done with these kinds of powers?"
In Washington, policymakers are beginning to address the pivotal role the Internet may play in promoting human rights and democracy.

In October, Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to develop policies to counter Internet blocking around the world.
Patrick Ball, who travels the globe giving human-rights organizations technological advice in his job as deputy director of the science and human-rights program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, cautions that even the most advanced technological creations have limitations.

"Every security solution I know about will tell someone who is monitoring electronic communication, `Hey, this person is doing something interesting,'" Ball said.
"If you encrypt your e-mail, the person monitoring it says, `I can't read it. What's she hiding?'"

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