Campaigners are urging technology giants including Apple and Microsoft to revoke certificates from Chinese certificate authority CCNIC after a change in the organization’s administration and a complete nationwide block on Gmail.
Users inside the Great Firewall have been unable to access the popular webmail service since Boxing Day, according to widespread reports.
This coincided with a new chairperson taking the helm at CCNIC, appointed by censorship tsar Lu Wei, who is director of the Cyberspace Administration of China.
That agency is directly responsible for the blocking of sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to anti-censorship body Greatfire.org.
It added in a blog post.
“Before September 2014, CNNIC was nominally led by the Chinese Academy of Science (?????). This partly explains how CNNIC was able to convince large software vendors to trust them as a certificate authority. But now CNNIC is directly governed by an office that is directly in charge of censorship and GFW. Lu Wei and Cyberspace Administration of China report to Xi Jinping directly.
Now that CNNIC is directly under the control of the office that is responsible for Chinese internet censorship controls, we again strongly encourage organizations, including Apple and Microsoft, to revoke CNNIC certificates.”
CCNIC was involved in high-profile Man in the Middle attacks on Apple, Google and others last year as the authorities struggled to cope with the increasing numbers of sites switching on HTTPS, which the Great Firewall can’t filter for content.
Although Microsoft for one has blacklisted CAs in the past, in India, it’s unlikely Redmond and its rivals will want to anger the Chinese authorities for fear of reprisals which could affect their bottom line.
Microsoft is still awaiting the outcome of an antitrust investigation into its business there.
The shift in power at the top of China’s formidable censorship apparatus is likely to spell bad news for those campaigning for unfettered online access in the People’s Republic, according to Greatfire.
“The complete block of Gmail was likely related to the appointment of a new chairperson for CNNIC. Through this person, Lu Wei is continuing to build his profile as China’s internet czar and to centralize more of China’s internet administration under his direct control.
In the future, we can expect that censorship measures will be put in place on a more timely basis and that the authorities will be able to act much faster when controlling information which they deem to be sensitive.”
Chinese Gmail users can still access their webmail but only via a VPN or via third-party platforms like Apple iOS or Outlook.