Some Canadian developers are about to release a tool that will allowed web users subject to government censorship to surf the net free of blockage. Psiphon is a product of the Open Society Institute, an arm of the Soros Foundation.

It is great that folks are aiming to provide a free, uncensored internet to less fortunate humans of our planet, but I have a big problem with this. The system in question doesn’t provide anonymity for the user, meaning any node running the software for said user can freely see what they are browsing. It is going to take about ten seconds for evil governments to set up nodes of their own in the free world, and nab their citizenry as they browse.

psiphon is not an anonymous software program. psiphon users are not anonymous from the psiphon provider. Although traffic between the psiphon user and psiphon provider is encrypted, psiphon providers can potentially monitor everything that is done by the psiphon users they host.

These guys should have taken a look at Tor first, although I suspect someone may have been looking for a grant instead of looking for something useful.