Beat the Censor

In the wake of this month's London Cyber Conference and another similar conference in Brussels, the topic of Internet freedom and online censorship continues to be an important issue in Net activist circles. Earlier this month, the European Union held a weekend-long hacking session, inviting developers to create new tools to better understand these issues. A three-man team from Luxemburg and Germany won one of the top prizes for their new online game "Beat the Censor." Sven Clement, 21, is a student at the University of Saarland in Germany and president of the Pirate Party of Luxemburg. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, he explains what he and his partners hope to achieve.

Deutsche Welle: What can you tell me about Beat the Censor? What are you guys trying to do?

Sven Clement: The game was developed during the EU Hackathon in Brussels earlier this month. The game should illustrate how censoring the Net influences different people. So actually we want to show how different citizens in different countries are impacted by online censorship.

I have the game in front of me. I'm looking at a map of the world on Google Maps. And I see little avatars in different countries, for example, Mexico. Then I'm drawing a line to China, and it says: "Access denied. Keyword filtering, URL or contents of the page are scanned for target keywords regardless of the domain name specified in the URL." So what am I supposed to learn from this?

Actually, the first iteration that we built in the Hackathon only shows the effects of blocking. We do not yet have proxies or VPNs implemented, but this should be coming in the next months, now that we have time to do it. [Ed: Proxy servers and VPNs are networking security tools that can be used to get around filtering and blocking.] This game, this first iteration, already shows you what blocking can do. You get a first-hand experience of how it feels when you see: "Acess denied" when you want to access facebook.com from China or rsf.org from Libya. So these should show everybody that uses the game how blocking different sites affects citizens of different countries.

In a game, there's usually an objective - ways to win the game. Is there a way to win this game?

In the current iteration, which I would classify as an alpha or early beta, there's no way to win the game except for being the fastest to connect the different pages. In the next iteration, we will include proxies and VPNs and you can actually beat the censor by circumventing Net censorship. This was the ultimate goal of the game, to give people a chance to show how useless net censorship is. In most cases, you can't simply circumvent censorship and thus beat the censor.

So the idea is to teach people who live in parts of the world like Luxembourg, Germany and most places in Europe where the Internet isn't censored what that experience is like. Is that right?

Yes, the goal of government transparency track, which we won, is to show lawmakers as well as citizens who live in countries where there is no or little censorship of the Net, and I hope we achieved that goal already. I hope that in the next iteration we can show how useless Net censorship is.

You say that Net censorship is useless, but there are many countries around the world like Iran, China and North Korea that have very restrictive policies. How do you think this game will change things for people like that?

Well, to take Iran as an example. I have some good colleagues in university who come from Iran, and they tell me that everybody, including their grandmothers, are using VPNs because they don't want to be surveiled. That they are circumventing censorship at the same time is a nice effect of the VPN. I believe that the people in Iran, China or North Korea already know how to access the Net. What is important is to show people who have no experience of censorship that a step of censoring one page is a step towards censoring more pages.

Why use the metaphor of a video game as a way to explain Internet censorship? Why not just put up a page explaining how to use VPNs and proxies?

Firstly, I believe there are already a lot of pages explaining how to use VPNs and proxies or illustrating in which countries there is censorship. We see a lot of infographics and explanations. But as far as we know, nobody has tried to show the effects of censorship in different countries. We believe the video game metaphor is the best one to engage people in trying to connect the dots and then encounter censorship on the way, and thus realizing that censorship is present.

To simply explain how the idea came: for me - being a citizen of Luxembourg, and sometimes living in Germany - I had no idea about Net censorship in real life until I went to Turkey and I could not access YouTube. This, for me, was the first time that I really realized that there was net censorship going on even in countries where I didn't think about it.

I believe that the game can show people from Germany, Luxemburg, France and other countries, where censorship is going on and which pages are blocked. [For example,] who in their right mind would block Facebook? I believe that most of the Western world doesn't see what censorship does to the Net, so they need a new way to get in contact with which pages are actually blocked in different countries, and this, we are trying to achieve with the game.

Interview: Cyrus Farivar
Editor: John Blau