Foiling Beijing's cyber cops

My colleagues and I spent two weeks, working round-the-clock, revising software that Chinese citizens could use to circumvent the censorship and gain access to the Western news and information sites the government sought to deny them. Our upgrade is now working, and information is flowing again. But after this latest exhausting bout, I feel it is important to speak out for the estimated 300,000 people in China who rely on my services but who cannot make their voices heard.

Like them, I was educated in China to believe that as long as you study math and science well, you will have nothing to worry about. I came to the United States as a graduate student in the sciences in the late 1990s. When American friends showed me a videotape about the Tiananmen massacre, I privately doubted that it was true.

Then, in 1999, I saw a 30-minute video that the Chinese state media were broadcasting to slander the Falun Gong spiritual movement. I had been practicing Falun Gong for two years, had benefited from it, and I knew of many others who embraced it as a renaissance of traditional Chinese spirituality. Suddenly, I realized that I had become a public enemy in China. I also realized that the Tiananmen tape I had been shown was accurate. And I saw how my government had deployed its massive resources to concoct lies and justify torturing and killing innocents.

In 2000, a friend showed me how he was trying to crash through the Great Firewall of China. He had a primitive mass e-mailing program, a buggy precursor that would eventually evolve into a program now commissioned by the International Broadcasting Bureau, a U.S. agency, to send mass e-mails for Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

My friend also had specially adapted peer-to-peer software he was designing to help Chinese users access blocked websites. I joined him and his team members in refining the technology, which allows a user in China to access an overseas website that "tunnels" them back to a blocked site. We also became involved in the Internet distribution of the "Nine Commentaries," a series of essays criticizing the Chinese Communist system.