DEFEATING INTERNET FILTERS

While hackers can always circumvent any type of Internet filters, ordinary citizens aren't always as skillful. Rather than force everyone to develop hacking skills, programmers around the world have united to offer simpler solutions for defeating Internet filters. The oldest and simplest method is to retrieve web pages through email. A newer and more advanced method is to access websites through a neutral third-party site.

Accessing banned web pages by email

Blocking access to specific websites is easy. Scanning email to determine whether someone is sending or receiving banned information is more time-consuming and labor-intensive. To exploit this limitation in most Internet filters, programmers have developed a way to retrieve web pages by email through something called a Webmail server.

Basically, a Webmail server acts like a middleman between you and a banned website. You ask the Webmail server to access a banned website for you and it retrieves either the text or the entire web page (complete with text and graphics), which it then sends to you by email.

To use a Webmail server, you need to send an email to a Webmail server and list the URL address of the web page you want to see (such as http://www.cnn.com). Within a few minutes, hours, or days (depending on the server) the server will email your chosen web page as either plain text or HTML code so you can read information that your Internet filter doesn't want you to see.

For example, if you wanted to retrieve information from the CNN website using a Webmail server at [e-mail], you would send the following email message:

 To: [e-mail] Subject: none GO http://www.cnn.com 

In the above example, you would type GO http://www.cnn.com in the body of your message where you would normally type your message. (Each Webmail server may use a slightly different syntax to retrieve web pages, so while the [e-mail] server uses the GO http://www.cnn.com, another Webmail server such as [e-mail] would require you to type SEND http://www.cnn.com instead.)

Here are some Webmail servers and the syntax to be used in the body of your message. Leave the subject line blank in all cases. Most of these Webmail servers will email you the complete HTML code for a particular website but a few only retrieve the text or require special commands to retrieve graphics too.

WEBMAIL ADDRESS	SYNTAX TO USE
[e-mail]	SEND <URL>
[e-mail]	SEND <URL>
[e-mail]	SEND <URL> (To receive the page as an HTML attachment, omit the GET command.)
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL>
[e-mail]	GET <URL> (retrieves text)
[e-mail]	GET <URL> (retrieves graphics)
[e-mail]	GO <URL>

Note 

To learn more about accessing web pages through email, visit the Web-to-Email website at http://www.bellanet.org/email.html. For more detailed instructions about using a specific Webmail server, send an email message to the server of your choice with the word HELP in the body of the message (leave the subject line blank).

Accessing banned web pages through a third-party website

An Internet filter may keep you from accessing a specific website, such as http://www.playboy.com. However, an Internet filter won't always block you from accessing a website that appears harmless. Some programmers have taken advantage of this fact by letting you use a seemingly harmless website as a browser to access a banned website. The apparently harmless third-party website then conveniently encrypts any information you receive from the banned website, disguising it as an ordinary encrypted business transaction so that the filter can't recognize it.

One of the more popular projects designed to circumvent censorship is the Peekabooty Project (http://www.peek-a-booty.org). Anyone can run the Peekabooty program to link their individual computer to the Peekabooty network consisting of other computers scattered all over the world.

When somebody wants to access a banned website, they connect to the Peekabooty network, which selects a computer out of its network at random. This randomly selected computer then grabs the web pages from a website and sends them back to the user.

If you want to help people in other countries access information freely on the Internet, download and run the Peekabooty program today. Your computer just may help someone in an oppressed society find the banned information they need.

At one time, a CIA-sponsored company called SafeWeb (http://www.safeweb.com) offered a similar network called Triangle Boy. The CIA used Triangle Boy to allow Chinese citizens to circumvent the Chinese government's Internet filters. (Wouldn't it have been easier just to tell Prodigy not to filter the Internet for the Chinese government in the first place?) While the CIA used Triangle Boy ostensibly because the Chinese government restricts their citizens' right to information, they didn't use the same technology to help citizens in Saudi Arabia access websites that the Saudi government didn't want them to see-perhaps because China doesn't supply the United States with much of its oil, like Saudi Arabia does?

SafeWeb eventually licensed Triangle Boy to a company called PrivaSec (http://www.privasec.com) because they claimed it wasn't profitable enough to continue supporting. Researchers later discovered that Triangle Boy didn't mask a user's identity as much as it claimed. So the lesson is that, no matter how much a government might try to censor information, there will always be a way to circumvent those restrictions. Unfortunately, any attempts to circumvent censorship won't always be 100% successful either, so if you don't want to get caught violating your government's Internet restrictions, your best bet is to make sure you never support any government that endorses censorship in the first place.