The Connection Has Been Reset – The Atlantic

Illustration by John Ritter

Many foreigners who come to China for the Olympics will use the Internet to tell people back home what they have seen and to check what else has happened in the world.

The first thing theyll probably notice is that Chinas Internet seems slow. Partly this is because of congestion in Chinas internal networks, which affects domestic and international transmissions alike. Partly it is because even electrons take a detectable period of time to travel beneath the Pacific Ocean to servers in America and back again; the trip to and from Europe is even longer, because that goes through America, too. And partly it is because of the delaying cycles imposed by Chinas system that monitors what people are looking for on the Internet, especially when theyre looking overseas. Thats what foreigners have heard about.

Theyll likely be surprised, then, to notice that Chinas Internet seems surprisingly free and uncontrolled. Can they search for information about Tibet independence or Tiananmen shooting or other terms they have heard are taboo? Probablyand theyll be able to click right through to the controversial sites. Even if they enter the Chinese-language term for democracy in China, theyll probably get results. What about Wikipedia, famously off-limits to users in China? They will probably be able to reach it. Naturally the visitors will wonder: Whats all this Ive heard about the Great Firewall and Chinas tight limits on the Internet?

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of Chinas electronic control but its new refinementand a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addressescertain Internet cafs, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information wholesome.)

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese governments attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss itat least with methey tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the governments approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control peoples daily lives.

Disappointingly, Great Firewall is not really the right term for the Chinese governments overall control strategy. China has indeed erected a firewalla barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside worldbut that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet users, is the Golden Shield Project. Since that term is too creepy to bear repeating, Ill use the control system for the overall strategy, which includes the Great Firewall of China, or GFW, as the means of screening contact with other countries.

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points, so that each packet of information could be routed quickly around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points: the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north, where cables come in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, where they also come from Japan; and Guangzhou in the south, where they come from Hong Kong. (A few places in China have Internet service via satellite, but that is both expensive and slow. Other lines run across Central Asia to Russia but carry little traffic.) In late 2006, Internet users in China were reminded just how important these choke points are when a seabed earthquake near Taiwan cut some major cables serving the country. It took months before international transmissions to and from most of China regained even their pre-quake speed, such as it was.

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few international gateways a device called a tapper or network sniffer, which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. Mirroring is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of Golden Shield computers.Here the terms creepiness is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where its supposed to go, Chinas own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

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The Connection Has Been Reset - The Atlantic