SafeWeb

» see safeweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The years when this country needed one of these came later, and by then SafeWeb was long gone and the tools had different names. YouTube was blocked here for most of two years starting in 2008. In March 2014 the government blocked Twitter and people went out and spray painted Google's public DNS addresses on walls in Istanbul, which is the most Turkish solution to censorship anyone has yet produced. All of that is a decade after this company shut its doors. In 2001 I was seventeen and on a dial-up line and the thing I could not reach was whatever the modem had given up on.

SafeWeb was a website with a text box on it. You typed in the address you wanted, and SafeWeb went and got that page and handed it back to you inside an encrypted connection to its own servers in California. No download and nothing installed, which mattered enormously because the people who needed it most were often sitting at a machine that was not theirs and could not install anything on it.

It opened in October 2000 and the audience found it almost immediately. Saudi Arabia alone was sending tens of thousands of users a day until the government caught up and blocked it. Human rights workers in Central America used it to get reports back to their headquarters, and medical students in Arab countries used it to reach medical websites the national filter had classified as pornography, which is the sort of failure every filter makes and no filter ever fixes.

~ the dossier ~

~ the box on the page ~

The design was the reason it worked and the reason it died. Everything ran through SafeWeb's own machines, which meant every image and every page anybody in the world requested was paid for twice in bandwidth, once coming in and once going out. A free proxy is a company volunteering to buy the internet for strangers.

It was also, from the censor's point of view, a single address. One server farm at one range of IPs, and blocking the lot was an afternoon's work for anyone running a national firewall. The company knew this from the start, which is where the strange part of the story comes from.

~ triangle boy ~

Triangle Boy was SafeWeb's answer to being blockable. It was a small program volunteers anywhere in the world could run, turning an ordinary home computer into a relay. A user inside a censored country connected to a stranger's machine in Germany or Canada, and that machine passed the request on, so what the national firewall saw was a residential IP address it had no reason to know about. Block one and there were more. The firewall was now fighting a list that grew faster than it could be maintained.

This got noticed by people whose interest was not commercial. The Broadcasting Board of Governors paid SafeWeb to run relays specifically so that Chinese readers could reach Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and the VOA pilot ran on twelve dedicated machines. Stephen Hsu presented the design at DEF CON 9 in July 2001, and in January 2002 he sat in front of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and explained it to Congress. China blocked what it could find and the researchers who studied it afterward filed it as one of the first serious attempts at distributed circumvention.

~ who paid for it ~

On 30 November 2000, In-Q-Tel signed a licensing agreement with SafeWeb, made public the following February. In-Q-Tel is the CIA's venture arm and it put in around a million dollars, structured as a license with warrants rather than a straight equity stake. Its chief executive at the time called the technology an innovative approach to information security, which is what you say when you cannot say the other thing.

The agency's stated interest was protecting the anonymity of its own people online, and it declined to rule out other uses. So for about a year the same software was a censorship tool for dissidents and a cover story for intelligence officers, funded by one government's intelligence service to be used against the firewalls of several others.

~ the twentieth of november ~

In November 2001 SafeWeb turned off the free service. The reasons given were unglamorous and completely believable: the bandwidth cost too much, and the advertising that was supposed to cover it had evaporated with the dot-com collapse. The economy after September had no room for a company giving away expensive infrastructure either. Thirteen months of operation and it went out on a bill it could not pay.

What survived was the enterprise half. Jon Chun took over as chief executive in January 2002 and the company rebuilt itself around an SSL VPN appliance, a rack unit that let employees reach an office network through a normal browser with no client software, which is the same insight as the free proxy sold to people with money. Symantec bought the company on 15 October 2003 for $26 million in cash. The censorship tool was not part of the deal, because by then there was nothing left of it to buy.

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