Tor like online privacy services help Chinese and others against surveillance

In 2005 Shi Tao, a Chinese human rights activist, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after authorities tracked him down using data provided by Yahoo. The Internet service supplied information that it garnered about his location when he accessed his Yahoo e-mail account. That was enough to find him and put him in jail.

Now, human rights activists are looking to a new generation of Internet privacy tools to keep companies from gathering such data, hoping that it will protect dissidents like Shi. One, called Tor Foundation, scrambles information, then sends it over the Web. It hides the user's location and gets past firewalls. Those features make it popular with activists in countries like China and Iran. Furthermore, Tor lets surfers get around Internet censorship software, whether installed by governments or companies seeking to keep workers from using social networking sites like Facebook. It can also protect against identity theft and monitoring by parents, suspicious spouses and bosses. It may even be able to evade the warrantless wiretapping program started in the United States following the September 11 attacks.

One of Tor`s biggest financial backers is the U.S. government, which contributed $250,000 of the $343,000 in income the nonprofit reported in 2007, the most-recent year for which financial data is available. "We are trying to encourage a certain freedom of the Internet," said Ken Berman, director of information technology at the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America. Besides, he added that Tor use has risen in China as authorities block access to sites that the government has banned for political reasons. They include Google's e-mail service, Twitter, Microsoft Corp's Hotmail.

Connections to Tor from Iran surged five-fold in June as protest organizers used social network services Facebook and Twitter to coordinate demonstrations in the wake of the country's disputed presidential election. In addition, the nonprofit group Human Rights in China plans to test a newer version of Tor to secure its communications. It is also developing tools to fight surveillance. "As activists, we want anonymity and security. The challenge is to keep up with the new technology," said Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom.

Tor competes with several other technologies, including one known as Freegate, which China's banned Falun Gong movement developed to allow its members to communicate in secrecy. Freegate runs on a dedicated network paid for by a U.S.-based company that owns the product, Dynamic Internet Technology, which is run by members of Falun Gong. DIT also sells an e-mail service that evades spam-filters installed to weed out correspondence related to human rights and other sensitive topics. Customers include the Voice of America and Human Rights in China. According to Hom, it distributes about 250,000 e-mails with Human Rights in China's electronic newsletter, about 80 % of which make it past the censorship filters.