Going incognito with VPNs in the age of surveillance | The Listening Post (Feature)

why here at the listening post we've

sometimes wondered how many of our

online viewers are watching us over a

VPN how many of you are disguising your

location changing it from Beijing to

Boston from Riyadh to Reykjavik to cover

your tracks Virtual Private Networks

have been around for more than two

decades now and they were not originally

developed to circumvent surveillance and

censorship they were tools for

corporations and governments to connect

their offices in different countries to

make it easier for people to work

together but as the monitoring and

control of the web have grown a market

has emerged and expanded for people to

work around Internet blocks and to hide

their location online particularly

popular in countries with authoritarian

tendencies such as Iran China and Turkey

VPNs are now getting downloaded in more

and more countries like Sri Lanka across

the Arab Gulf as well as the US as data

theft online tracking and web blocking

grow increasingly common the

listening-posts

meenakshi ravi now on the use and uses

of VPNs

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three months ago in Sri Lanka social

media platforms including Facebook

whatsapp Instagram and YouTube were

suddenly inaccessible a series of bomb

attacks across the city of Colombo had

security forces on high alert the

government said the online blocks were

necessary to prevent misinformation from

spreading this was the second time in

just over a year that social media

access was cut off across the country

and it did not work very well

Sri Lankans rely on social media as a

primary mode of communication so about a

million of them turned to their VPNs

re-routing their way virtually back onto

those platforms VPNs Virtual Private

Networks first came into use in 1996 and

they are among the most enduring

innovations in online browsing with

popularity on the rise around the world

countries like Vietnam Indonesia and

Turkey

rack up some of the highest numbers of

software downloads turkeys notorious for

its internet censorship over 240,000

websites are currently blocked from

Turkey and in addition to that over

150,000 URLs of well-known newspapers

and online news media update site

Dolce Vela BBC News Turkish news outlets

like Joe Murray 8 billion everyone self

and others so if you're trying to access

alternative news you cannot see them

from Turkey unless you use VPN it has

become part of the daily a internet

usage very recently for example during

the protests in Sudan the authorities

issued an Internet shutdown and a lot of

people were using VPN to circumvent this

censorship it really enabled thousands

and thousands of people to have access

to social media to share pictures videos

to communicate between each other but

also with the world about what was going

on in

country and one side you'll have the

activists and the journalists so we're

using VPNs to get information out of a

country then you'll have more ordinary

users who just want want to watch

pornography or sports and people do that

all the time I don't know if has a

legitimate use for VPNs obviously some

will skirt legality but people use VPNs

for all different sorts of reasons

VPNs used to be quite complicated and

difficult to set up now it's a matter of

you know downloading app pushing a

button and even the best services are

just a few dollars a month so we

certainly don't think it's a luxury I

don't think privacy and security is a

luxury so VPNs are no more luxury than

saying having a lock on your front door

over the last few years the number of

VPN services has boomed Nord VPN hotspot

Shield expressvpn ton over cyberghost

these are just a few of the most popular

names on the market while each VPN says

it offers something different the

underlying principle is the same for all

of them it's about setting up an

intermediary a distant one between you

and the website you want to access so

the way that a VPN works is it's

essentially a computer elsewhere in the

world that you first connect to before

going to the inside so if you are in Sri

Lanka you can connect to a VPN outside

of the country in the US and then go to

Facebook and then that way you can

actually access these services they also

encrypt traffic as well so anyone on the

same network be that on your home Wi-Fi

your work network a public cafe or even

your internet service provider they will

not be able to see the websites that

you're going to it protects them as well

an effective VPN first is a VPN that

works because not all VPN work in in in

every country some countries actually

block access to VPNs and secondly it's a

VPN that is secure it means that the

channel of communications and the

information that transits between you

and the VPN is encrypted it means that

they don't use that information or share

that information with third parties one

you want to make sure that they have

strong encryption products

since encryption is the key way that

VPNs protect your security secondly you

want to make sure that a VPN has the

right policies and measures in place to

ensure that none of your internet tivity

is logged on a VPN itself for the VPN

server itself making sure that you know

you're not exposing yourself to

additional risks and you use a VPN the

jump in VPN use hasn't gone unnoticed by

governments in countries like Belarus

Iran Oman and Russia for instance VPNs

are subject to heavy restrictions there

are even some laws in place banning them

increasingly VPNs are coming on to

authorities radars and getting targeted

in Turkey VPN usage is not criminalized

so it is not illegal to use VPN services

however Turkey amended its internet law

in February 2014 and there's a provision

which states that the authorities could

request access blocking to VPN services

several of these well-known VPN services

are inaccessible from Turkey and if you

manage to access their websites that

have an account with them then they

don't work in China for example a number

of VPNs don't work and there were

actually at some point and I was saying

that it would ban or VPNs and they did

remove a lot of VPNs from the Apple

Store and Google Play and so on

however banning all VPNs would also

affect the economy of a country it will

affect how a number of business can

actually operate in a country so it

wouldn't be really wise for a government

to ban all VPN but it is indeed a

concern that especially the most

efficient VPNs are the most secure or

rights respecting VPN might be loved

Chinese authorities aren't just blocking

many foreign million services they've

been actively pushing the use of state

approved and locally created VPNs users

have to register to use them and explain

why they need them these services

guarantee neither privacy nor anonymity

and in a country where censorship is

stringent and dissent is quashed

unsecure VPNs that come with Beijing x'

seal of approval leave many people

exposed but it isn't just

state-sponsored

or state approved VPNs that have holes

in their security with free VPNs it's a

case of downloaders beware generally

speaking users can't really trusts free

VPNs they may create a log of all the

websites you visited and then sell them

to a third party perhaps an advertiser

sort of agency so a painful VPN which is

really the only way to actually do it

securely is in some ways a luxury good

it can cost anywhere from five to ten to

twenty dollars a month to have this sort

of additional security proportion that

the vast majority of people probably

aren't prepared to unpay for that being

said the barrier of entry for VPNs has

dramatically decreased you no longer

have to be a technologist to use them

you can download an app onto a very

cheap low powered Android phone and that

can provide a high level of protection

as well VPNs have come a long way they

were initially used just by large

corporations then they became the online

tool of choice for journalists

campaigners and political dissidents

however as online tracking geo blocking

web shutdowns at random and unsecured

public web connections have increased

VPNs have become used in some of the

most unexpected ways Turkish Internet

users are technologically savvy I would

say youngsters but the older generation

as well now parents teach their children

how to access Wikipedia through weekend

so that they can do their homeworks from

Turkey you know I've seen students

logging into a server in a different

time zone so that they can get their

test results early

kpop fans around the world logging to a

Korean server so that they can vote for

their favorite band and the online poll

so some of those more esoteric these

cases are surprising but when it comes

to government and state blocks that is

something that we've been seeing all

around the world for the past decade and

will only continue to increase

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