The "Anti-Censorship Proxy" and technological circumvention of Internet censorship

Presented at DEF CON 7 (1999), Unknown date/time (Unknown duration).

Brian Ristuccia's Anti-Censorship Proxy (ACP) is a tool for circumventing network-level Internet censorship. It combines functionality of older software such as PGP, Anonymizer, and steganography software, enabling Internet users to bypass firewalls and proxy servers without detection. ACP can be used to circumvent firewalls used by China and Saudi Arabia to block criticism of their governments, or to bypass software used in American schools to censor pages about contraception, animal rights, and many non-Christian religions.

These countries and institutions are likely to crack down on the use of such software, provoking an "arms race" between ACP developers and their opponents. (The use of strong encryption in ACP may even conflict with some countries' import/export regulations.) This talk will describe the ACP and look at some of the directions that such an "arms race" might take, as well as describing real-world implementations of network-level censorship (in China, Serbia, the Middle East, as well as many U.S. schools), what kind of content is censored, and how the ACP could be used to bypass these restrictions. More information at http://ians.978.org or http://www.peacefire.org/bypass/Proxy/


Presenters:

  • Brian Ristuccia
  • Bennett Haselton
    Bennett Haselton has been publishing studies of Internet censorship software since 1996. His reports have been used as evidence in First Amendment court cases filed by the ACLU and People For the American Way, and he has been invited to speak on Internet censorship at Computers Freedom and Privacy 99, the American Library Association national conference, the ACLU of Ohio annual conference, InfoWarCon 99, and Spring Internet World 99. Peacefire's reports criticizing censorship software have been featured on CNN financial news, MTV, Court TV, and MSNBC.

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