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title: Chaos Computer Club offers help to victims of censorship in China
date: 2008-08-04 00:00:00
updated: 2009-11-07 17:56:21
author: vt100
tags: update, pressemitteilung, zensur
In response to widespread outrage against internet censorship in China,
the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) offers aid in circumventing the censorship
measures to the affected athletes and journalists.
<!-- TEASER_END -->
The so-called "Great Firewall of China" \[6\] consists of an assortment
of filtering and blocking technologies, most of them installed by
corporations from the US and Europe. The Chinese government uses these
systems to disable access to websites whose content does not suit them,
or even modify website content en route to the user.
"Censorship in China is a symptom of a surveillance state that has been
technologically supported by western corporations for years", CCC member
Björn Pahls comments on the situation. "Since its formation, the CCC has
always worked against all forms of censorship, which has become
commonplace in so many states today".
The CCC describes technologies and methods of circumventing censorship
on a dedicated website \[1\]. Journalists and visitors on their way to
China are offered USB-thumbdrives containing the Tor-Browser \[5\]
software. The availability of these so-called "Freedom Sticks" is
limited only to the duration of the Olympic Games. Also, German digital
rights activist group FoeBuD e.V. offers "Privacy Dongles" through their
web store \[7\].
To circumvent the Chinese censorship, the Freedom Stick uses the Tor
network. Tor is a worldwide system of servers, run by volunteers to
combat censorship and suppression of information by anonymizing data
packets transmitted over the Internet. It encrypts the data and routes
it through different servers within the Tor network, rendering useless
any efforts of tracing it back to the source. A controversial new German
law on data retention, currently on appeal at the German Federal
Constitutional Court, criminalizes the operation of Tor network nodes.
This complicates the work of volunteers that support democratic
movements in dictatorships and oppressive states.
"We are calling upon the German authorities to stop criminalizing the
operators of servers of the Tor network. The behavior of the authorities
is detrimental to the people in oppressive states, whose lives are at
risk. China is only one of many examples", says Björn Pahls of the CCC.
### see also:
- \[1\] <http://chinesewall.ccc.de/>
- \[2\] [Photo of the Freedom Stick, free
usage](/press/releases/2008/20080804/Freedomstickgetrennt.jpg)
- \[3\] [Tor and China, Roger Dingledine at the
23c3](http://media.koeln.ccc.de/browse/congress/2006/23C3-1444-en-tor_and_china.html)
- \[4\] [Censorship in Germany
(German)](http://www.ccc.de/censorship/)
- \[5\]
[Tor-Browser](http://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/index.html.de)
- \[6\] <http://greatfirewallofchina.org/>
- \[7\] [buy Privacy Dongle
(German)](https://shop.foebud.org/product_info.php?pName=privacydongle-torpark-auf-usbstick-p-151)
Media contact: Chaos Darmstadt, presse(at)chaos-darmstadt.de
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