Taipei, Taiwan – Chen, a Chinese programmer, makes a living by working remotely for Western technology companies.
But in his free time, he answers a higher calling: helping his compatriots penetrate China’s Great Firewall, which blocks free access to the internet.
Chen is a volunteer “maintainer” who helps run V2Ray, one of a number of open-source virtual private network (VPN) and proxy servers that have become increasingly popular as China cracks down on commercial VPNs, which are illegal to use without government permission.
Like commercial services such as ExpressVPN and NordVPN, V2Ray, whose original developer is unknown, allows users to circumvent censorship and hide their internet activity.
But unlike those platforms, V2Ray is free to use, requires some technical knowledge to set up, and has a wide range of customization options.
Chen, whose duties include fixing bugs and overseeing contributions to the project from the open source community, said that over the years, more than 141 individuals and groups have added to V2Ray’s source code.
“If you want to set up a V2Ray server yourself, you have to understand the technology. There is a learning curve, which is why it is not very widespread in other parts of the world right now,” Chen, who is based in the European country and asked to be called by a pseudonym to conceal his identity, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not something you can use straight out of the box. Batteries are not included.”
Despite a relatively steep learning curve, open-source platforms that anonymize internet users are playing an increasingly important role in the endless cat-and-mouse game between government censors and internet users in China and other undemocratic countries.
Global internet freedom declined for the 13th consecutive year in 2023, according to US human rights watchdog Freedom House.
Of the 70 countries assessed by the nonprofit, China was rated as having the most repressive internet environment, followed by Myanmar, Iran and Cuba.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is also changing how governments censor the internet, with at least 22 countries creating legal frameworks that encourage or incentivize tech companies to “deploy machine learning to remove objectionable political, social, or religious speech,” according to Freedom House.
State-led efforts at internet governance will be particularly important in 2024, a record-breaking year for global elections, with voters in more than 50 countries casting their ballots.
For open internet advocates like Chen, open source platforms such as V2Ray are appealing primarily because their source code is freely available to the public.
This will open up scrutiny from anyone concerned that the platform may collect data or contain secret backdoors that could be accessed by authorities.
“Open source allows us to assure users that we are on your side, that we’re helping you, and that everything we do is for your good. We’re not trying to help ISPs. [internet service] “It depends on the provider and the government,” Chen said.
“We are not spies. We are helping you. We are representing your interests in a hostile environment.”
V2Ray is especially popular in China, but it’s just one of several open source options available worldwide.
These range from proxy servers, which hide a user’s IP address, to VPNs, which reroute, encrypt, and obfuscate internet traffic through a remote server.
One of the best known platforms is Tor, an open source browser launched in 2002 to provide users with anonymity online.
Other platforms, such as MTProxy, allow users to access specific apps, such as Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.
Browsers Unbounded, a project being developed by VPN-like platform Lantern, promises to “crowdsource the internet” by allowing people in open internet countries to rent out their IP addresses to people in restricted environments.
“Basically, Lantern today has a rotating set of around 20,000 IP addresses,” Adam Fisk, Lantern’s lead developer, told Al Jazeera.
“And the idea is that if you can crowdsource more IP addresses, then the number of IP addresses that censors have to deal with could theoretically be in the millions.”
The project is still under development, but a preliminary version has been released as a widget for the news site China Digital Times.
Services like Lantern and V2Ray take advantage of the fact that the internet is becoming increasingly essential to everyday life, even in non-democratic countries like China.
Because many of these tools are built with anonymity in mind, authorities would need to shut down the internet to prevent their use altogether — a measure likely to unnerve even illiberal governments, given the massive disruption and economic damage it would cause.
Because regular marketing is impossible in repressive environments, platforms like V2Ray often spread through word of mouth and “guerilla-style” advertising.
During the internet shutdown in Iran in 2019, protesters shared information about a popular anti-censorship tool, Siphon, through paper flyers distributed in apartment buildings, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The flyer included information about where users could download Psiphon, a combination of technologies that obfuscate internet traffic and evade restrictions in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the government.
An investigation by private cybersecurity firm BitDefender found that Tehran was distributing fake VPNs to spy on protesters.
Dirk Rothenberg, a senior adviser at Siphon, said the platform’s usage rises and falls with world events like protests or elections, sometimes gaining millions of users for a few days before returning to normal usage levels.
Rodenberg said the platform has not only grown in popularity in Iran, but has also been widely used during recent periods of unrest in Cuba, Myanmar and Russia.
“From a censorship perspective, the technology to detect and block unwanted traffic is getting better, and the technology to circumvent it is also getting better. So it’s an ongoing game. We need to stay ahead of them and they need to stay ahead of us,” Rodenburg told Al Jazeera.
“Part of our work is to partner with university researchers working in this type of field to develop protocols that are more effective at circumventing censorship strategies.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Psiphon has been accused by various governments, including Tehran, of receiving CIA backing.
Psiphon began as a project at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, but is now heavily funded by the U.S. government-funded non-profit Open Technology Fund (OTF).
OTF funds dozens of open-source projects like Psiphon, as well as more experimental tools such as Geneva, an anti-censorship algorithm developed by the University of Maryland that uses machine learning to develop and scale anti-censorship strategies.
The OTF said it prefers to fund open source tools because they are more secure and can be independently verified in the field by users who may be as wary of the U.S. government as they are of their own governments.
“Because OTF focuses on people under the surveillance of repressive governments, there is a high bar to gaining their trust, and they must be able to independently verify that the technology we support is secure,” Nat Kletjung, OTF’s senior vice president of programs, told Al Jazeera.
“Allowing local, trusted security experts and technologists to independently verify how the tools work – to look inside at anything that could put users at risk – is an important part of demonstrating that the tools we support are trustworthy and safe to use.”
