Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on this article. Ok, I completely believe that China is blocking lots of websites. I also think that government censorship is a very bad thing. However, I do not believe this is causing an issue for journalists.

There are a few reasons for my disbelief. The first is that (as I understand) in general the great firewall blocks people who do not otherwise have contacts outside China from certain material. Once you have a contact in another country there are all sorts of ways to get around it. More on this later. Second the article is talking about journalists in general so many of them are part of major news organizations that have journalists all over the world with varying degrees of web restrictions. And many of them have had reporters in China for a long time. So even if the average American or even average American company could not figure out how to get around it I would expect these companies to have invested in finding a way around it.

So how do you get around the great firewall? Well, lets start with the lowest tech. Perhaps you want to get to a certain Amnesty International site, you could write a NYT article about how you can't - or you could call an intern in the US (or perhaps India to avoid time zone issues) and ask them to print and fax or next day the information. Not great, but not hard to figure out. A bit more complicated, but instead of faxing send in an encrypted email (maybe average joe doesn't know how to do it, so hire a CS major from the local college to show you how). You could setup a proxy, takes a bit of knowledge, but a friend offered to setup one for me when I was there. You could probably use TOR which is a free program from the EFF and redirects web traffic through many computers so it is not easy to see where it is coming from or going to. Or finally the most likely - use VPN possibly combined with VNC. My understanding is basically all major companies have VPN setup (a way to securely join the company's network when out of the office), even the 100 person company I worked for used VPN (which was setup and maintained by one person). Plus I would think journalists need a way to securely submit their articles without government oversight or having them stolen. If just VPN is not enough then run a program like VNC or windows remote desktop (which comes with windows) that allows you to control another computer so instead of sending a website it is sending screen images and over an encrypted connection thanks to VPN.

Sorry, didn't mean to dig into the technical quite so much, but wanted to make it clear that any international journalist, especially if connected to a major news organization, should have no problem getting to anything on the web. So I say stop your fake whinnying and write about a real problem - perhaps all the Chinese people who really are not able to get to these websites.