Ever since foreign-backed riots broke out in Iran in mid-September, Western news outlets have frequently drawn attention to Psiphon. The free, open-source smartphone application and computer program allows users to circumvent national restrictions on websites and online resources, helping troublemakers organize and coordinate their activities, and send and receive messages to and from the outside world.
The Internet has given incredible freedoms to humanity. The ability to share, discuss or discover anything and everything anywhere at anytime is powerful, and it's helped me personally. I wouldn't be the same person today if it was not for a free and anonymous internet.
It's quite saddening to see Internet freedom be co-opted for purposes like this. The intelligence apparatuses will lecture other countries on the sad state of their Internet access while they clench down on Internet freedoms back at home.
I like this article, Kit. Good research chops. But it seems to miss a big part of the story. I have been using Psiphon in China for years, mostly because it's free. I don't remember why, but I always assumed it was out of Pakistan despite the Canadian domain. That caused a little concern, because China-Pakistan relations could have meant that Psiphon was a honeypot to catch malefactors in China. I wasn't very worried, because I don't have anything to conceal and I have a friendly relationship with the China government. (I'm even supportive of them regarding their internal affairs: considering all of the rampant smearing by people like Matthew Tye, Winston Sterzel, and other creepy vloggers.)
Now I happen upon your article. Good stuff, informative, but I don't understand why you don't mention that Psiphon originated out of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and continues there. That's its home. I just looked it up, and you could have, and it's a very big thing that you don't mention it once in this article to provide balance. You portray Psiphon as a spook operation. If there's money coming directly into UT from the CIA, I'd be rather surprised. You make them sound like an arm of the spook government whose goal is regime change, when they're actually mostly just progressive promoters of the open internet and take credit for big change. Bangi's a creep for sure, but you almost make it sound as if he were pulling the strings at Psiphon. Of course he had nothing to do with them.
I'm a longtime Chicago activist of minor repute. I co-founded organizations like Protect Our Parks (fought privatizing of public parks), AIGA's Design for Democracy (improved the voting experience), and various hacktivist projects. Some of these received significant money (e.g., checks in the $50,000+ range) from partisan, anti-mainstream political players and wealthy malcontents with a healthy dislike for the Chicago Machine. We used the money for major lawsuits against the city. When we earned media about our accomplishments, you can be sure we boasted about them, but we also disclosed our funders, both nonpartisan and partisan. It's the law, either de jure calling for periodic publication or else available via request of access to records (equivalent of FOIA in Canada for publicly funded entities like UT). If Psiphon's people want to tout their influence on Iran, I think it's fair game, although they should probably disclose their funders. Did you look into this at all?
I know, I know, I'm a U.S. citizen and I don't like it any more than anyone else that my taxes go to the CIA's manipulative practices abroad. But notwithstanding its support sources, Psiphon's activities from Toronto qualify more as overt operations, not covert. Your article is of value to show the historical connections and sustained operation of these overt ops throughout the 20th century and continuing to this day, in the form of Radio Free and other media operations. China, the U.S., BBC, NYT, all big media outlets control public opinion in unsavory ways, to drive their big agendas. That's not news, it's an uncomfortable fact of the world that needs to change. See Manufacturing Consent.
It depends on the software. I'm not sure about Psiphon, but Tor and Tails (also OTF backed projects) give complete anonymity which make it completely impossible to trace. Signal has a feature called 'sealed sender' which stops them from knowing who's sending messages to who ((https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/). Another program funded by OTF, Certbot, has actually made the Internet much more secure by issuing TLS certificates automatically and making it so that connections to websites can't be intercepted.
I hate to be spruiking for spooks but a lot of the software that they back is actually useful, and is also useful for avoiding censorship and mass surveillance that we have here in the west.
I'll also add, something I find suspicious is Telegram Messenger. It's a major unencrypted messaging app (meaning that the operators can see every message that has been sent through it, it's incredibly insecure) that has been popular in Iran, Russia and Belarus for quite some time now and has been used to organise protests in these countries, circumvent censorship in news. For years it ran out of Singapore, Berlin, London without any sort of legal troubles. There's a shitload of illegal stuff on Telegram, and nobody has ever really done much to stop it and it never gets taken down. Even when people in western countries used it to break laws it was never taken down. They have servers in Miami, Amsterdam and Singapore as well. I always thought that it was backed by some sort of western intelligence, or was simply 'allowed to exist' by whatever greater powers that be because it was helpful to them. I don't have any evidence to back my suspicions though.
Tor is not impossible to trace. Security agencies run poisoned nodes. To quote ChatGPT: The routing nodes in the Tor network are run by volunteers and some of them could be compromised.
The Internet has given incredible freedoms to humanity. The ability to share, discuss or discover anything and everything anywhere at anytime is powerful, and it's helped me personally. I wouldn't be the same person today if it was not for a free and anonymous internet.
It's quite saddening to see Internet freedom be co-opted for purposes like this. The intelligence apparatuses will lecture other countries on the sad state of their Internet access while they clench down on Internet freedoms back at home.
I like this article, Kit. Good research chops. But it seems to miss a big part of the story. I have been using Psiphon in China for years, mostly because it's free. I don't remember why, but I always assumed it was out of Pakistan despite the Canadian domain. That caused a little concern, because China-Pakistan relations could have meant that Psiphon was a honeypot to catch malefactors in China. I wasn't very worried, because I don't have anything to conceal and I have a friendly relationship with the China government. (I'm even supportive of them regarding their internal affairs: considering all of the rampant smearing by people like Matthew Tye, Winston Sterzel, and other creepy vloggers.)
Now I happen upon your article. Good stuff, informative, but I don't understand why you don't mention that Psiphon originated out of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and continues there. That's its home. I just looked it up, and you could have, and it's a very big thing that you don't mention it once in this article to provide balance. You portray Psiphon as a spook operation. If there's money coming directly into UT from the CIA, I'd be rather surprised. You make them sound like an arm of the spook government whose goal is regime change, when they're actually mostly just progressive promoters of the open internet and take credit for big change. Bangi's a creep for sure, but you almost make it sound as if he were pulling the strings at Psiphon. Of course he had nothing to do with them.
I'm a longtime Chicago activist of minor repute. I co-founded organizations like Protect Our Parks (fought privatizing of public parks), AIGA's Design for Democracy (improved the voting experience), and various hacktivist projects. Some of these received significant money (e.g., checks in the $50,000+ range) from partisan, anti-mainstream political players and wealthy malcontents with a healthy dislike for the Chicago Machine. We used the money for major lawsuits against the city. When we earned media about our accomplishments, you can be sure we boasted about them, but we also disclosed our funders, both nonpartisan and partisan. It's the law, either de jure calling for periodic publication or else available via request of access to records (equivalent of FOIA in Canada for publicly funded entities like UT). If Psiphon's people want to tout their influence on Iran, I think it's fair game, although they should probably disclose their funders. Did you look into this at all?
I know, I know, I'm a U.S. citizen and I don't like it any more than anyone else that my taxes go to the CIA's manipulative practices abroad. But notwithstanding its support sources, Psiphon's activities from Toronto qualify more as overt operations, not covert. Your article is of value to show the historical connections and sustained operation of these overt ops throughout the 20th century and continuing to this day, in the form of Radio Free and other media operations. China, the U.S., BBC, NYT, all big media outlets control public opinion in unsavory ways, to drive their big agendas. That's not news, it's an uncomfortable fact of the world that needs to change. See Manufacturing Consent.
Congratulations !!
PS: FYI
Twitter Files - Wikipedia -- Kathleen McCook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Contents
1 Background
2 Content
2.1 Content moderation of New York Post story
2.2 Visibility filtering
2.3 Attack on the Capitol and suspension of Donald Trump
2.4 FBI communications with Twitter Trust and Safety Team
3 Reactions
3.1 Politicians
3.2 Legal scholars
3.3 Privacy and security
3.4 Former Twitter employees
3.5 Journalists
3.6 Commentators
4 Reference
It depends on the software. I'm not sure about Psiphon, but Tor and Tails (also OTF backed projects) give complete anonymity which make it completely impossible to trace. Signal has a feature called 'sealed sender' which stops them from knowing who's sending messages to who ((https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/). Another program funded by OTF, Certbot, has actually made the Internet much more secure by issuing TLS certificates automatically and making it so that connections to websites can't be intercepted.
I hate to be spruiking for spooks but a lot of the software that they back is actually useful, and is also useful for avoiding censorship and mass surveillance that we have here in the west.
I'll also add, something I find suspicious is Telegram Messenger. It's a major unencrypted messaging app (meaning that the operators can see every message that has been sent through it, it's incredibly insecure) that has been popular in Iran, Russia and Belarus for quite some time now and has been used to organise protests in these countries, circumvent censorship in news. For years it ran out of Singapore, Berlin, London without any sort of legal troubles. There's a shitload of illegal stuff on Telegram, and nobody has ever really done much to stop it and it never gets taken down. Even when people in western countries used it to break laws it was never taken down. They have servers in Miami, Amsterdam and Singapore as well. I always thought that it was backed by some sort of western intelligence, or was simply 'allowed to exist' by whatever greater powers that be because it was helpful to them. I don't have any evidence to back my suspicions though.
Tor is not impossible to trace. Security agencies run poisoned nodes. To quote ChatGPT: The routing nodes in the Tor network are run by volunteers and some of them could be compromised.
You're right, it's only secure if you're using the hidden services.