Hack China!

In Google, China and the Cult of Mammon I identified the broader enemy, Mammon, and the specific target, the Communist regime of mainland China. I also hinted at the means of attack. Now I will go into more detail. But first, I need to define some terms.

First, the *players*. There's us - we in the free world who are willing and able to act. Then there's the enemy, the ChiCom government. There are also the people of China. Let's divide these into the active dissidents and the masses. Finally, there are collaborationists - corporations that are helping the ChiComs stay in power.

Now, the tools of the enemy. They are *censorship and fear*. We can't attack the main part of fear directly. The people of China need to overcome this themselves. Those we call "dissidents" have already done so. But we can attack censorship. (And by way of attacking censorship, we can undermine the fear a bit. To weaken censorship is to visibly weaken the regime's control, hence its prestige, hence its capacity to intimidate the populace.)

The censorship has internal and external components. *Internal* censorship is when the regime prevents its subjects from talking to each other. *External* censorship is when the regime prevents its subjects from communicating with the outside world.

The censorship has two modes: prevention and intimidation. *Prevention* is when the regime uses technical means to make communication physically difficult or impossible. *Intimidation* is fear - fear of punishment if you engage in proscribed communication. Intimidation depends on being able to spy on communication, and being able to track down the participants. When Yahoo rats out a dissident, they are collaborating in the intimidation.

The communication which censorship opposes has two *aspects*: accessibility and searchability. Accessibility means the communicator can distribute information in a way that an intended communicant can receive it if he knows how to find it. Searchability is the ability of a would be communicant to find such information without knowing in advance exactly where to look for it.

Searchability is what Google's latest collaboration threatens. In order to read something, you have to know where it is. And knowing where it is, is in itself information, and can be censored.

Communication comes in three *scopes*: public, group and private. Public communication is publishing - making information available to anyone who wants to read it. Group communication is communicating to a select group. Private communication is sent to a single individual.

The communication has *choke points*, at which it is vulnerable to censorship. These are routers, gateways, and, as far as searchability is concerned, Web search engines. When a router or gateway filters transmission, the code that accomplishes this is called a *firewall*.

There are means of working around all of these. But it's not easy. I insist that it's possible and worthwhile, but it's not easy. A future post will go into detail about the state of the art. For now I'll just name the concepts involved. Don't worry if you don't understand all the terms here. If you're curious, you can Google (with luck!)

Every choke point seizes on some identifying aspect of a message. Call these the *shibboleths*. A router or gateway uses and IP address - the address of a computer on the Internet as a shibboleth. Another shibboleth used here is a port number. The way to defeat these is to use a *peer-to-peer* network, that does not use a fixed port number. A peer-to-peer network is a network within the Internet, by which various nodes (computers on the network) find each other and exchange data.

A more insidious choke point is *content*. Google refuses searches on certain keywords. More advanced firewalls (and be sure, China has them) filter on keywords in the data being sent. The way around this is encryption. Encryption also makes private communication possible, if you use it properly.

Now what about public communication? You've got a message that you want to get out to all of China, and that means the authorities can see it to. How to do so without revealing yourself, and ending up in the gulag? What you need is an encrypted peer-to-peer network that uses *multiple hops* so that the recipients don't know where the message came from. Because, sooner or later, the authorities will discover the network and view the public information on it, by the same means that everyone else does. If the network is properly designed, they will find a *node* but that won't help them track down the sender of any given message.

So, we need a peer-to-peer network with multiple hops, encryption, and a search mechanism. We need to extend it into Communist China. We need to grow the network once it's there. It's not much use until it gets large. Ideally, every person in China who has a PC should have access to this network. In practice, the regime is going to find about this network at some point and try to shut it down. But they can't shut it down all at once because they can't find it all at once. So we need a network that will grow itself faster than they can kill it off.

When the network gets large enough, censorship in China will be unworkable. In its early days, the component that's actually in China will be small. Most of those on it will be the dissidents. Once the network has put down roots, the dissidents can spread by any way they choose. We just have to get it to them in the first place, preferably without breaking any of our society's laws. (We can work on getting the laws changed at our leisure.) One way to do this is by what I call a *benign trojan*.

A benign trojan is a piece of software to run a node of this network, plus the addresses of a few existing nodes, called seed nodes, all hidden in something else. Something the authorities won't object to their citizens downloading. Perhaps some other sort of software, or an innocent looking file. It could be as simple as renaming the file. But the dissidents who stumble upon it will be able to figure out what to do with it. They'll extract the payload, and start up the nodes. Think of it as sneaking a hacksaw past the guards in a cake. (A regular trojan takes over the computer for malicious purposes. A benign trojan doesn't take over the computer, it helps take over a society.)

Once it's there, it will spread, perhaps by more benign trojans, perhaps by other means of the people's own devising. But won't the regime notice? Won't they try to shut down or block the Web sites with the benign trojans from the free world? Won't they lean on the Mammon worshipers here to get those files taken down? Yes, they will. And the files will be taken down. But it will be too late.

What will the regime do next? Try to hunt down the nodes. And they're bound to find some of them. But if we've designed the software right, they'll never find them all. New nodes will come into existence faster than they can track down the old ones.

And then what? They can stop the external component of the communication only by disconnecting the internet from the global Internet. That will devastate their economy, thus weakening their position. Remember what happened to the Soviet Empire when Reagan got stingy with the aid?

And there will still be the internal component. The only way to shut that down is to shut down the nationwide internet. Economy weakened still further. The government looking weak. Looking desperate. The very fact of their taking such drastic actions will tell the people just what the regime most wants the people *not* to know: that the rulers are afraid.

Shut it all down, or don't shut it all down. Either way, they lose.

The hard part is designing the software right. People have tried.. But they always leave out something important. That's why I've tried to enumerate every factor here. Have I missed anything? Let's have some peer review. Be as merciless as you like in your comments, so long as you make sense. Tear my work apart, and I'll patch it back together again later. When it gets to the point that you can't tear it apart, that will the time to start writing code.





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Google, China and the cult of Mammon

So Google has joined the ranks of companies helping the ChiComs keep their subjects in the dark. So much for "do no evil." They've even pulled their do no evil statement from the Web. Their rationale? That this was the only way to do business in the emerging market, and that maybe they could do some good there if only they can manage to have a presence.

Both these defenses are complete and utter bovine excrement.

Let's look at the first one. Call this the "it's just business" defense, or the Godfather defense. The implication is: we care about right and wrong, really we do, but only if it doesn't interfere with making money. Now there's nothing wrong with money per se. Money is good. Everyone should be concerned with making money. The difference between a practical person and a soulless, greedy bastard is this: whether right and wrong are the top priority, or whether money and power trump morality. I say right and wrong must come first, or else all civil society comes apart. People who think anything else comes first are behind all of what is wrong with the world. They are the enemies of humanity. They are evil. They deserve no consideration whatever.

Okay, how about that second line? Call this "gotta be in the game to win." No, you don't gotta be in the game to win. If the game is rigged - and this one certainly is - your best bet is to change the rules of the game. You can't do that from within the game. (Of course, if you're really on the other team...)

It's been about 16 years since Tienanmen Square. All that time we keep hearing talk about how the way to democratize China is to bring it into the world economic community. Economic prosperity will lead to democracy... somehow. When? What's the timetable? Oh, never mind the timetable. I know demanding a timetable can be unfair sometimes. Let me ask another question: where are the unmistakable signs of progress? The only time China ever lets any dissidents out of jail is when the United States leans on them. As soon as the pressure is off, they put `em right back in the gulag again. The only sign I see of emerging democracy is reports of widespread riots, many in the rural areas where the prosperity *hasn't* happened.

This economic investment is *not* helping to free the Chinese. It's helping to keep them repressed. Never mind the theory. I'm concerned about the facts.

So, then. We've revealed the enemy, by blowing away the smokescreen of lies and doubletalk. The enemy is not an organization or ideology. It is Mammon, the god of Just Business. Both Communists and capitalist worship this idol. Some people own money and power. Nothing wring with that as such. But sometimes money and power own people. This is Mammon. Mammon reduces humans to commodities, and society to the equivalent of war. It despises freedom, equal opportunity, competition, truth and basic decency. It must be slain.

Mammon rules in lower Manhattan, in Hollywood and in Redmond, Washington. It rules in Communist China. It rules in Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It rules in sub-Saharan Africa and South America. (No, Mammon does not bring about wealth as such - merely its concentration in the hands of a few.)

Mammon's worshipers shift their ideological rhetoric to suit the needs of the moment. They can pass themselves off as being of the right or the left or even the center, because they truly believe in nothing but Mammon. In practise, they tend to be pro big government *and* pro big business. What they really are is pro bigness. The closest thing they have to a sincere political ideology is Leftism, precisely because Leftism is utterly bereft of positive values.

Liberty under law is the friend of humanity. But Mammon is hostile both to liberty and to law.

So, how do we defeat Mammon? First, defense. We must champion all that Mammon hates. Liberty under law. Free speech. Individual rights. Individual responsibility. Common sense. Common decency. Free enterprise, by which I mean competition to provide value to consumers, and the sort of innovation that comes only from small enterprises. All these we must advocate, and loudly. We who enjoy freedom of speech, let us make the most of it.

Second, offense. Communist China is *not* a legitimate government. There is no real law there, only power and money. They are using the computers we invented, bought with money we invested, to spam us and to hack us, but this is as nothing compared to what they do to their own subjects. A state of war is the absence of a state of law. And that's exactly what we have here. So no compunctions about being nice or law abiding. These ideas simply don't apply to the situation. I'm not saying we should be utterly amoral in our actions. The end does not justify the means for us, as it did for Lenin. But results justify both ends and means. Let us act in such a way as to bring about a positive net result.

Also, I don't advocate vigilante attacks against corporations in the free world who are collaborating with the enemy. There's law here, even if it isn't always just, and we could get into both legal trouble and P.R. difficulties. But on a global scale, there is no real law. There is no real international law, because there is no international Sheriff or deputies. Bush is trying, but he's too narrowly focused on the Islamist threat right now. So we need international vigilantes.

All of us who care about humanity must attack regimes such as Communist China by any means we can devise. Our first target should be their censorship mechanisms. They can survive for a while without foreign investment or foregin technology, but they can't last a week without censorship. Forget boycotting Google, Cisco and Microsoft. This would be a fine gesture, but it's not nearly enough by itself. Maybe Congress will do something about these traitors, and maybe not. But there are always more Mammon wosrshippers eager to be of service for the right price. What I'm calling for is this: every one of us with computer skills ought to look for ways to defeat censorship in China and elsewhere, via technical means.

There is no international law, but there is an international Internet. Naturally, the Internet is a lawless place. Anyone, who's been spammed or subject to a hack attack from overseas and tried to get satisfaction, knows there are no cops to call who can do anything. We're all pretty much on our own online. The Internet is a key battleground. Why cede it to the enemy by our own inaction?

I'll go into more detail about this in a later post. But for now, please digest this idea: hack China!


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