U.S. tech companies are getting caught in the crossfire between increasingly stringent Chinese censors and the free-speech activists determined to pierce the Great Firewall of China.
Activists outside China are disguising Internet traffic, which includes social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Gmail, and news websites, banned by Chinese authorities by tunneling it as encrypted data through cloud servers owned by U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal said in a report on Monday.
These cloud services, which are run by tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Akamai Technologies, were originally intended for businesses to improve their website speeds. But activists are now using them to get around China's online censors and dragging the cloud providers into the censorship war, the report said.
To block the influx of prohibited content, authorities would have to block entire servers of these companies and disrupt hundreds of businesses in the process, according to the activists.
"Essentially, it's similar to forcing authoritarian regimes to kill everyone in a protest because they can't tell the real agitators from the bystanders," said Adam Fisk, a Los Angeles-based programmer and founder of an app called Lantern that is designed to outmaneuver censors.
Lantern works by utilizing content delivery networks (CDN), a service offered by cloud providers that helps websites run faster by saving copies of data at multiple locations across the globe.
Once registered, a user behind the firewall can access the cloud network and, via an app or desktop software, visit a mirror version of the banned website. As the data is encrypted, censors are unable to see the content.
Reporters Without Borders, an anti-censorship non-profit based in France, said last week that they used a similar method to unblock banned political websites in different countries, including the Tibet Post in China and the Gulf Center for Human Rights in the United Arab Emirates.
The workarounds are often implemented without the consent of the cloud providers, who are facing a worsening business climate in China especially with recent cybersecurity leaks made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
CloudFlare, which offers CDN services, said last week that it banned Lantern from accessing its networks due to unauthorized use.
"We don't do anything to thwart the content restrictions in China or other countries," said chief CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. "We're a tech company and we comply with the law."
Earlier in November, Verizon Communications, Inc. announced that its cloud service EdgeCast was blocked by China, cutting access to thousands of websites from the country.