Google Takes On Authoritarian Web Censorship with New Online Tools

Google is furthering the cause of free expression and anti-authoritarianism on the internet with a new lattice of programs designed to protect human rights organizations and news sources from attacks on the web.

The projects - called Project Shield and uProxy - are spearheaded by "Google Ideas," the company's "think/do tank." They aim to remove online barriers that block content from people living under authoritarian, censor-happy regimes, as well as create barriers to block attacks from people who want to take that content down with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Google is hosting a summit in New York City called "Conflict in a Connected World" with partners the Council on Foreign Relations and the Gen Next Foundation to discuss its project, as well as to assess how online tools can help free expression.

Project Shield

Google detailed its new projects on its blog, which it hopes it can get hacktivists to join, test, and improve. The Mountain View giant described Project Shield as "an initiative that enables people to use Google's technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by 'distributed denial of service' (DDoS) attacks."

DDoS attacks are used to suspend services of a website host by flooding the targeted servers with so many extraneous communications requests that the host network either dramatically slows down, reaches its peak usage (especially for small websites) and/or the server gets overloaded and shuts down.

DDoS attacks are proabably most famous as the favorite tool of the hacker group Anonymous (and particularly LolSec). The specific DDoS attack software used by Anonymous, often called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon in reference to Star Wars, has been used to take down the websites of credit card companies and other targets like the Church of Scientology for the mixed motives of protest and mischief.

But denial of service attacks can also be used by authoritarian regimes to silence dissent - especially because dissenters' channels of communication on the web are often small, vulnerable networks.

As Google explains in its Project Shield video, Project Shield will combine Google's own DDoS mitigation technologies and network speed-optimizing enterprise service PageSpeed in order to protect vulnerable organizations serving media, elections, and human rights-related content from such attacks.

Right now, Project Shield is invite-only, and is looking for security professionals, entrepreneurs, and dissidents to be "trusted testers" of the web shield.

uProxy 

The other side of Google's initiative is to help prevent authoritarian systems from censoring the web at the individual's level. To protect from surveillance, misdirection or government filtering, Google is launching an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox called uProxy.

Developed by the University of Washington and Brave New Software, the browser extension is designed to provide a "trusted pathway" between end-users on the net, freeing the flow of information from prying eyes.

uProxy is also in private beta right now and is looking for technically talented trusted testers to work out the kinks.

Digital Attack Map

Perhaps the most interesting part of Google Ideas' new slew of antiauthoritarian free-speech tools for journalists and citizens not engaged in dissent under an authoritarian regime is the Digital Attack Map.

Built under a collaboration between Google and Arbor Networks, the Digital Attack Map provides live visualizations of DDoS attacks on a global map, as well as providing historic information about previous attacks and real-time information about outages across the globe.