door of his hotel room woke Alan Huang with a start. He looked at the clock: 5:30 am. Huang had been in Shenzhen, China, for only a few days; who could be looking for him at this hour? He groggily undid the lock—and found a half-dozen police officers in the corridor. The cops were there, they said, because the 37-year-old software engineer was a follower of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. It was December 1999, and the Beijing government had outlawed the sect just months earlier.

In fact, that’s why Huang had left his home in Sunnyvale, California, to come to Shenzhen. A Chinese computer programmer who had long ago emigrated to the US, Huang was back in China to protest the government’s jailing of thousands of his fellow practitioners. He hadn’t expected to join them.

Huang ended up packed into a cold cell with 20 other men, sleeping on the floor in shifts and forced to clean pigpens every day. Huang’s wife, back in California with their 3-year-old daughter, was terrified. After a very long two weeks and the help of a few American politicians, Huang and two other US-based Falun Gong practitioners who had accompanied him were released. “I got lucky because I was a US resident,” he says. “Others were not so lucky.”

It was Huang’s first experience with prison, but not with Communist Party repression. When he was an electrical engineering student at Shanghai’s Fudan University in the 1980s, Huang marched in the pro-democracy protests that roiled China. But the heady days in the streets came to a bloody end when the government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square. Huang wasn’t arrested, but some of his acquaintances disappeared. And he was shocked by the way the government’s ensuing propaganda barrage convinced many Chinese that the protesting students were themselves to blame for the bloodshed. Disillusioned, Huang left China, got his graduate degree at the University of Toronto, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1992. He spent most of the 1990s quietly living the immigrant-American dream, starting a family and building a career. Along the way, he also became one of the Bay Area’s hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners, leading study sessions and group exercises. So when Beijing launched its crackdown on the sect, it felt to Huang like 1989 all over again: The government was brutalizing a peaceful movement while painting its adherents as dangerous criminals. This time, he was determined to fight back. His aborted trip to China and frightening weeks in jail only left him more resolute. “My experience told me that the persecution was more severe than what we can imagine,” Huang says in accented English. “I felt I needed to do something.”

Huang has hunched shoulders and a round face thatched with bushy black hair; his bashful mien occasionally retreats into a nervous giggle. He’s no charismatic revolutionary. But by 2002, he had assembled a dozen like-minded Falun Gong-practicing colleagues. In the small garage attached to his four-bedroom bungalow, they developed a digital weapon for their compatriots back in China: a program designed to foil government censorship and surveillance. Dubbed UltraSurf, it has since become one of the most important free-speech tools on the Internet, used by millions from China to Saudi Arabia.

A separate group of Falun Gong practitioners, it turned out, was working on something similar, and in 2006 the two groups joined forces as the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. Most GIFC members spend their days as cubicle-bound programmers and engineers at places ranging from Microsoft to NASA. But off the clock, at night and on weekends, they wage digital guerrilla warfare on the Chinese government’s cyberpolice, matching their technical savvy, donated computers, and home-office resources against the world’s second-largest superpower. Again and again, Beijing has attacked the firewall-beating programs; again and again, the scrappy band of volunteers has defeated those attacks.

The victories don’t come easily. Huang quit a lucrative job to devote all his time to the cause. He has drained almost all of his savings. He had to sell his home and move his family into a rental, where he now works out of a spare room, making ends meet with freelance consulting gigs. Most days he sits in an armless swivel chair, bent over computers set up on a folding table. But there is one major consolation. “More and more people are using our technology,” he says. “And that’s the force that will tear down the Great Firewall.”

China maintains what is probably the world’s most advanced system for controlling digital communication. Authorities and opponents call it the Great Firewall, and the Chinese take it extremely seriously. At least 72 Chinese citizens—more than in any other country—are currently locked up for things they said online. Firewalls typically block access to certain sites, but the centerpiece of the Chinese system, called Golden Shield, does much more. It’s essentially a national digital surveillance network that monitors China’s estimated 420 million online citizens. This titanic task is facilitated by the fact that all international Internet traffic passes through just a handful of state-run pipelines.

A censor—be it a government, school, or corporation—has several options for preventing people from visiting places on the web. The simplest is to block a site’s Internet protocol address, the numbers that identify the computer hosting the site. A similar trick is to block DNS names, the text versions of IP addresses. Both tactics place an entire website off-limits. More technically difficult is keyword filtering, which blocks any traffic—search request, URL, or email—containing specific words or phrases. The Golden Shield does all those things so well that China reportedly exports the technology to other authoritarian countries, including Cuba and Belarus. And it’s supplemented by thousands of human censors who scour blogs, chat rooms, and everything else for offending content. China even jams seditious text messages.

Programs designed to defeat those measures are called circumvention tools. That’s what UltraSurf is: Operating through a web browser, it drops search queries or emails into an encrypted tunnel that scrambles the data to make it unreadable. Then the data gets routed to a network of computers—proxy servers—located in the US or some other unrestricted country. Though the circuitous path slows the connection a bit, it also provides access to sites like CNN, YouTube, and Twitter and leaves no record on the user’s computer.

But building robust circumvention tools is tough—as David Tian, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, knows well. Like Huang, Tian left China after narrowly avoiding arrest as a pro-democracy protester. He emigrated to the US and started practicing Falun Gong. Following the Beijing crackdown, at about the same time Huang started working on UltraSurf, Tian teamed up with a North Carolina programmer named Bill Xia and others via Falun Gong chat rooms. They planned to create a newsletter to counter Beijing’s propaganda, but they had to work carefully; six students and professors at Tsinghua University had been imprisoned in 2001 for posting Falun Gong materials. (Like all other GIFC members I met, Tian politely refused to let me see where he actually does his work. They’re a secretive bunch, afraid that the Chinese government might find out too much about them. Most don’t even want their names known. So despite the thumping midsummer humidity, we spoke at an outdoor lunch spot in the Maryland suburbs.)

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Authors: Vince Beiser

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