China cracks down on censorship workarounds

The Chinese government is cracking down on a key technology that web surfers use to protect their privacy and get around online censorship, according to BloombergNews.

Some of the country’s biggest telecom companies — the state-run China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, Bloomberg said — are being instructed to block customers from using virtual private networks, a technology that redirects a person’s internet traffic through other servers to make it look like they are connected to the Web from someplace else.

For years, Chinese citizens have used VPNs to circumvent the country’s Great Firewall, the colloquial term for a series of blocks and restrictions imposed on the internet by Beijing in an effort to ensure that only a filtered version of theweb is visible to most of the country. VPNshave allowedtechsavvy Chinese internet users to access restricted news sites and social media platforms.

China has periodically clamped down on internet users’ attempts to evade the Great Firewall. Thelastsuch campaigntook place in2016, prompting widespread reports of VPN outages. But the government has intensified its attack on VPNs in recent months. In January, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ruled that all VPNs that did not seek government approval to operate would be deemed illegal. Under President Xi Jinping, the VPN crackdown is part of an effort to “clean up” the Chinese internet and enhance the country’s “cyber sovereignty,” has said.

The moves will make it harder for the average Chinese citizen to find a way to access the open internet, said Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert and China scholar at the New Yorkbased Council on Foreign Relations.

“Bad,” he said of the implications of the ban. “Getting around (it) will require using VPNs based outside of the mainland or setting up and using (one’s) ownVPNservers, additional barriers for the individual user.” the government