Tor: Thwarting Oppressive Regimes

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/iran-reportedly-blocking-encrypted-internet-traffic.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/tors-latest-project-helps-iran-get-back-online-amidst-internet-censorship-regime.ars?src=fbk

Should what people do on the Internet be policed? I think under most circumstances, and I think that most people would agree with me, no. The Internet is, by its very nature, a free technology (both free as in beer, and free as in speech). The primary objective of the Internet is to facilitate the rapid and easy exchange of information and communication. Unfortunately, because of the young age and rapid development of the Internet and Internet-related technologies, the Internet, like highways or streets, is policed.

Particularly, oppressive regimes can't get enough of restricting and policing the Internet usage of their citizens. Currently, the country generating the most negative buzz in this area is Iran. A statement by an Iranian resident, posted on Hacker news, reads "Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted [sic] down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible. Almost all websites that run on Google APIs (like wolfram alpha) won't work. Accessing to any website that relies on https (just imaging how many websites use this protocol, from Arch Wiki to bank websites). Also accessing many proxies is also impossible." Anyone who uses the Internet knows that Google is to the Internet what The Beatles were to rock music; it would still exist without them, but it would be much worse. Right now, I'm running Chrome, Google's web browser, and using Blogger, Google's web app for blogging. But, as the Iranian citizen said, the Iranian government has blocked not only Google's services, but any website using the https protocol. This blocks access to an enormous part of the Internet.

Luckily, computer programmers and people in technology tend to be good people (although I will admit to being a little biased towards them). This brings me to the Tor network. Without going into too many technical details, the Tor network allows for anonymous Internet access through encryption. Because Tor relies on encryption to function, this blocking of encrypted data by the Iranian government had a massive negative effect on Tor usage. According to the second news story, Tor users in Iran dropped from around 50,000 on February 8th to almost zero on February 10th. Thankfully, some geniuses created a bridge called obfsproxy, which disguises encrypted traffic as regular traffic.

Though Tor connections in Iran are currently on the rise, it is unsure whether on not this is due to obfsproxy or due to the Iranian government lessening their censorship. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that obfsproxy has played some role in preserving the anonymity of Iranians. So, Tor and obfsproxy, for that, I commend you.