Iranian protesters use Chinese software to sidestep censorship
Updated
Iranian pro-democracy demonstrators have been using software developed by Chinese activists, to access websites banned by the government.
Freegate was developed by a team of volunteers from the Falun Gong spiritual group. But now it's estimated as many as a million Iranians use the free service each day.
Presenter: Desmond Ang
Speakers: Bill Xia, inventor of Freegate; Shiyu Zhou, Deputy Director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium
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(screaming)
ANG: The death of Neda Agha-Soltan would have been in vain, had it not been for the Falun Gong and their desire to liberate internet surfing in Iran.
The 26-year old was observing post-election protests when she was shot in the chest.
A passerby recorded the scene and posted her dying moments on YouTube, bringing global attention to a conflict the Iranian government was trying hard to muffle.
The Iranian government began blocking certain websites in the lead up to the presidential elections.
Foreign news services, religious websites and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were said to be on the blacklist.
But Iran's internet firewall proved futile against Freegate's software, which allows users to access blocked sites by constantly switching different Internet Protocol addresses.
Bill Xia is the inventor of Freegate.
XIA: We're very happy to see our tools become very useful for people especially for the people in Iran where people cannot get their voice out.
ANG: He says the number of users from Iran multiplied after Freegate was translated into Farsi.
XIA: Last year, the traffic on our network is too high and we cannot sustain the cost so we actually start to limit the service, but last month we tried to open it to Iran to provide as much service as possible. Mostly it's from China and Iran and they total to more than one million users per day.
ANG: Shiyu Zhou is the Deputy Director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, which developed the Freegate software.
Zhou: The reason that we created this service was mainly due to the suppression of the Falun Gong in China in '99, many of us were Tiananmen students during the Tiananmen massacre time in '89 so we knew how frightening state controlled media can be like in China that can turn white into black overnight.
ANG: He says the software drew the most visitors from closed societies such as China, Iran, Syria and Burma.
Zhou: People want to know what's going on, because people care about society, people care about other people and they want to know what exactly is happening and they hunt for information over the internet because it has become an open platform, its a multimedia platform. It has become the most powerful and widely used form of media at this time around the world. And this is the same for people in the closed societies that they want this.
ANG: The consortium recently released a software called Green Tsunami, to counteract China's upcoming mandatory internet filtering program, Green Dam.
