N.C. outfit pierces China's firewalls

Web users see past censors

Bill Xia wants to lead a life guided by simple principles.

Truthfulness. Compassion. Tolerance.

But he's caught up in a complicated business: staying a step ahead of China's Internet censors.

Xia's North Carolina-based company, Dynamic Internet Technology, disguises Web sites so they can slip past China's firewall filters. It allows Internet users in China to browse otherwise blocked pages involving such taboo topics as human rights, banned religious groups and peasant uprisings.

Trying to outwit China's cybercops is a cat-and-mouse game, not without risks.

Xia is reluctant to have his photograph taken. He agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the city where he lives and works not be disclosed. He met with a reporter in a quiet corner of a Triangle Starbucks.

Though they keep a low profile, Xia and like-minded people who have been dubbed "hacktivists" have recently been thrust into the international limelight.

On Feb. 15, a congressional subcommittee hauled executives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco Systems into hearings about their business dealings in China. Legislators also recently introduced bills that would prohibit U.S. businesses from bending to censorship in other countries and promote technology like Xia's to let people circumvent government censorship online.

"It's not that suddenly we did something new," said Xia, who founded Dynamic Internet Technology in 2001. But attention on the other companies, he said, prompted people to ask: Is it possible to get around China's firewall?

"And yes," he said, "actually, people have been succeeding at this for years."

Studying physics in an Ohio graduate school in the 1990s, the Chinese native was once content to be ensconced in some university library, cozying up to an equation-filled textbook. He planned to become a professor.

But that trajectory changed.

Finding a mission

Xia became friends with some computer science students. And he joined Falun Gong, a group that combines calisthenics with spiritual cultivation. The Chinese government banned Falun Gong as a subversive organization in 1999.

Xia, who is in his early 30s, said his dramatic awakening came in July 1999 when China started to crack down on millions of Falun Gong followers, imprisoning and punishing practitioners. "Then it became personal," Xia said.

He noticed the discrepancy between his own experience in Falun Gong and news about it from China, which branded it an "evil cult." He saw how discussion was restricted on online Chinese forums, how e-mail mentioning the subject got dropped.

"I started to see the need to let people access uncensored info," Xia said.

Each day, his company sends out e-mail to millions of Chinese Internet users with links to the Web pages of a short roster of clients, including Human Rights in China and the United States-sponsored Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Visits to such sites spike whenever there seems to be a government cover-up, as during the initial outbreak of a deadly respiratory virus in 2003 or the reported shooting of protesting villagers in December.

Organizations such as Voice of America are an important source of income for Xia's company. Over the past three years, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, has directed about $2 million to Xia's company, Dynamic Internet Technology, and $66,000 to UltraReach, another company that circumvents censorship.

The money pays for Dynamic Internet Technology's e-mail service for VOA and Radio Free Asia. It also supports technology that continuously changes the organizations' Web addresses to escape Chinese government shutdowns.