Collateral Freedom: A Snapshot of Chinese Internet Users Circumventing Censorship

GoAgent, the most widely used circumvention tool among the 1,175 surveyed users, routes traffic through Google App Engine IP addresses also used by Gmail and Google Apps for Businesses. The GFW resorts to DNS poisoning of appspot.com domains rather than IP-blocking these shared addresses because a blanket IP block would disrupt commercially critical Google services — and GoAgent bypasses the poisoned DNS by connecting directly to the unblocked IPs, making surgical separation of circumvention traffic from business traffic infeasible.

§2 Tool Usage, §3 Collateral Freedom Matters defense dns-poisoningip-blocking cn

Among 1,175 Chinese circumvention users surveyed in late 2012, purpose-built anti-censorship platforms showed severe attrition: Freegate had 44.3% former users but only 15.3% current users, while GoAgent and paid VPNs (piggybacking on commercially indispensable infrastructure) were the top two most-used tools in the past month. The median respondent had used four different types of circumvention tools, indicating frequent switching driven by blocking events.

§2 Tool Usage, Figure 2.1 evaluation ip-blockingdpi cn

China's 2012 real-name registration law for consumer-facing online services (including VPNs) is designed to enable censors to segment circumvention-related consumer VPN traffic from business VPN traffic — permitting selective blocking of consumer VPNs while leaving corporate VPNs operational. The GFW had already demonstrated protocol-level VPN blocking capability; registration provides the identifying information needed to apply that capability selectively rather than as a blunt instrument.

§1 Introduction, §3 Collateral Freedom Matters policy dpiip-blocking cn

Tor, which has minimal commercial footprint and a distinctive network signature, was blocked throughout China using tailor-made GFW countermeasures and lost approximately 85% of its Chinese users as a result. In contrast to GoAgent and VPNs, China's censors can block Tor without significant economic collateral damage, making it uniquely vulnerable despite its strong privacy properties.

§2 Tool Usage, §3 Collateral Freedom Matters evaluation dpiactive-probing cn

In a survey of 1,175 Chinese circumvention users, reliability ranked as the top factor in tool selection (cited more often than speed), while privacy and trust in the developer ranked last. The overwhelming majority are versatility-first users seeking fast, reliable access to social media and search engines and are largely unconcerned about surveillance; only a small minority of journalists, dissidents, and activists are privacy-first users.

§2 Common Problems, Figures 2.3–2.4 evaluation cn