ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A few days after China announced the mandatory installation of a piece
of censorship software on every PC sold in China, a leading
anti-censorship organization releases software to defeat it.
Global Internet Freedom (GIF), a consortium formed by a few technology
companies specialized in circumventing political censorship on Internet
by repressive regimes, today announced its release of “Green Tsunami”,
software designed for Chinese users to disable or get rid of “Green Dam”.
Green Tsunami gives users options to temporarily disable the monitoring
of “Green Dam”, or to completely remove it from users’ computers.
The censorship software, Green Dam, has been developed with the support
of the Chinese government, which then announced the mandatory
installation program for the alleged purpose of blocking pornography and
other “harmful” content, and to protect underage youth.
GIF’s analysis of the software reveals, however, Green Dam is designed
to filter a much wider range of content than pornography, with Chinese
keywords such as “Anti-China Congressmen”, “Falun Gong”, and even
“Argentina”.
In addition, Green Dam has built-in functions designed specifically to
cripple FreeGate and UltraSurf, two of the most popular anti-censorship
software tools developed and supported by GIF. Chinese users have used
both to circumvent the filtering and blocking of the Chinese national
gateways, the so-called “Great Firewall”. The censorship software is
also engineered to be very difficult for average users to uninstall it.
GIF has developed counter-measures to evade and defeat Green Dam, and is
releasing Green Tsunami with either FreeGate or Ultrasurf built in, so
users of GIF’s anti-censorship software will largely be unaffected by
China’s new move.
“One of the great privileges of my life has been to watch the GIF
developers play an instrumental role in causing Chinese regime to move
from efforts at national gateway monitoring and censorship to their
recent, desperate resort to an overtly Big Brother system requiring the
installation of bugs on every computer in China,” said Michael Horowitz,
a fellow at the Hudson Institute and advisor of GIF.
“The disabling of the regime’s ‘Green Dam’ bug system represents an
important step towards shattering the internet firewalls which 21st
century dictatorships mush maintain in order to stay in power. Today’s
‘Green Tsunami’ development is of as much importance to the people of
Iran, Burma, Cuba, Vietnam, and Syria as it is to the people of China.”
Mr. Horowitz said.
Green Tsunami-enabled FreeGate or UltraSurf is now available for
download, free of charge, at http://www.dongtaiwang.com
and http://www.wujie.net/download.htm,
respectively.
About The Global Internet Freedom Consortium
Formed in 2006, the Consortium is an alliance of a few of the leading
organizations in developing and deploying anti-censorship technologies
for Internet users in oppressive regimes. The Consortium partners have
contributed significantly to the advancement of information freedom in
China. The anti-censorship technologies the Consortium members developed
have enabled Internet users in China to securely visit websites blocked
by the Chinese government, such as those of Voice of America and Radio
Free Asia. For more information, visit http://www.internetfreedom.org.
