Voice Of America Aims To Break China's Web Site Blockades

September 1, 2001

WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 2001 AUG 30 (NB) -- The federal government agency behind international broadcaster Voice Of America (VOA) could be paying to help citizens of China surf the Web unfettered by their own country's Internet censors.

The International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), which also operates the Worldnet Television and Film Service and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, has confirmed it hopes to promote technology that can help surfers do an end-run around the kinds of data filters used by the Chinese government to block access to some Web destinations.

Joe O'Connell, a spokesperson for the VOA, told Newsbytes that Chinese authorities, who for more than a decade have frequently jammed its radio broadcasts, have worked to block access to its VOANews.com Web site since 1997.

China's government has also tried to keep its citizens from reading the Web site of Radio Free Asia, the three-year-old multilingual broadcasting service that began offering on-demand audio news in 1999. Radio Free Asia, like Radio Free Europe, also receives federal funding for its operations, but it is not run by the IBB.

O'Connell said the IBB expects to work with SafeWeb, an Emeryville, Calif., Internet security company that operates public proxy servers for Web users who find themselves hobbled by firewalls and filtering technology.

SafeWeb also offers Internet protocol (IP) address spoofing software called "Triangle Boy," a peer-to-peer application that a network of volunteers run on their computers to help users who may be blocked from accessing the SafeWeb proxies directly.

Triangle Boy, named after a "Seinfeld" television show character - an artist who painted only triangles - relays requests for Web pages to SafeWeb, which returns the information directly to the Web user who made the original request.

O'Connell said the IBB is in talks with SafeWeb over funding an effort to get more Triangle Boy servers available to Internet users in China.

He said the money for the project would come from a $5 million fund Congress has already approved to boost efforts to reach Chinese citizens with traditional broadcasting and the Internet.

The money for spreading Triangle Boy would be just part of an $800,000 slice of the funding earmarked for "Internet and multimedia enhancement," O'Connell said.

"The outcome of this exercise is that people who want to log on to our site will have a chance to do so," he said.

SafeWeb spokeswoman Sandra Song told Newsbytes that the computers running the Triangle Boy software don't have to be located within China for Web surfers in that country to be able to use them.

Instead, she said, the goal it to increase the number of Triangle Boy installations, making it more difficult for Chinese authorities to block access to the technology.

She said the ongoing discussions with the IBB might set the best approach to boosting Triangle Boy use, which could include enlisting more support and resources from Internet service providers.

Song said some of the costs of the program could include compensation for the increased bandwidth demands SafeWeb will see if the project is successful.

SafeWeb, which earlier this year received $30 million in funding from the non-profit venture-capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, generates some revenue through advertising on its proxy Web surfing sites.

However, Song said, the company's aim is to sell its technology to organizations building virtual private networks and safeguarding e-commerce transactions.

SafeWeb is at http://www.safeweb.com .

Voice of America is at: http://www.voa.gov .