Man punished for using a VPN to scale China’s Great Firewall and watch porn
- Unauthorised VPNs are illegal in China, but authorities said the man’s main crime was accessing pornography
- Police said the man used software designed specifically to circumvent the Great Firewall
The man, surnamed Chen, was apprehended by the local police in the city of Jinshi, located in Hunan province. The police said Chen was using an app called Shadowrocket, which allows users to connect to proxy servers using the censorship circumvention tool Shadowsocks, among other protocols.
The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system
Some circumvention techniques are more advanced – like Shadowsocks. While often referred to as a VPN, Shadowsocks is technically a disguised SOCKS5 proxy specifically designed to get around the Great Firewall.
While VPNs and Shadowsocks encrypt internet traffic, authorities suggested they were still able to figure out what Chen was browsing. Police said Chen’s main crime was accessing pornographic websites, according to the media report, which cites a now-deleted WeChat post from the city’s public security bureau.
Police didn’t say how they discovered Chen’s online activities. But encryption isn’t necessarily enough to protect users depending on where that data is going. Shadowrocket doesn’t provide any servers itself, just the software used to connect to them.
Authorities didn’t say what Chen’s punishment was, but the Jinshi police hinted at what it could be. They said that people using their own channels to access international networks could be fined up to 15,000 yuan (US$2,142). Those that sell the service could even face prison time.
