China's Cyber Crackdown.

Paul Baranowski sits in a small Toronto basement apartment surrounded by three computers hooked up to an LCD monitor and stacks of computer manuals. He describes his workspace as "minimalist," but there's nothing small about his mission. Baranowski, 28, is preparing to take on the biggest obstacle to the free flow of information in the world-- the People's Republic of China. He hopes to do it by developing a program--he calls it Peek-a-Booty--that will enable Chinese Internet users to browse the Web without fear of detection. "It's a very slow process," says Baranowski, who works on the program with a roommate "whenever we have time." The two have no outside financial support, says the computer engineer, who quit his job last year to devote himself to the project. "It's purely about Internet freedom."

But Baranowski and other hacker activists, or hacktivists, opposed to government control of the Internet may just be banging their heads against the Great Firewall. In recent months, Beijing--using state-of- the-art technology--has significantly stepped up its efforts to control the country's cyberspace, delaying dreams that the Internet would channel new ideas and freedom of expression in China. Some even wonder if the government hasn't already turned the technology to its own advantage as a tool of repression. "The bad guys have had a victory of sorts," says a Western diplomat in Beijing. "My friends who were cocky 18 months ago about the Internet are not so cocky now. There's a lot more to be worried about."

No one knows exactly how big China's Internet police force is these days, although estimates run as high as 40,000. But whatever its size, its sophistication is greater than ever. The government's new capabilities were revealed in September when it blocked access to the Google search engine for a week. When the blockade was lifted, Chinese surfers found their browsers' cache function--once an easy way to access information from banned Web sites--disabled. More ominous, the government also had the ability to search for keywords, and to block "sensitive" Web pages, like those devoted to Taiwan, the Falun Gong or foreign news coverage. The software, which experts say is "a great technological leap forward," punishes surfers who attempt to access blocked pages, preventing them from accessing the Web for up to to several hours. Chinese censors have also begun to employ filtering technology to block e-mails from the country's 49.5 million Netizens.

And Chinese authorities are going on the offensive. Beijing has become quite skilled at hunting down proxy servers that allow users to maneuver around firewalls. The average cyberlife of a new proxy server is now about 30 minutes. Nor are Internet cafes havens any longer for exploring the Net. Cafes in Jiangxi province are experimenting with swipe cards linked to customers' national ID cards. Some Beijing Internet cafes have installed surveillance cameras overlooking computer screens. One cafe manager took foreign reporters to a back room, where a police-linked computer, connected to four spy cameras, monitored users.

So how has China's Internet lockdown come to be so effective, so fast? "There's no way they could have done this without Western help," says Baranowski, back in his Toronto apartment. "Even now, they need Western help to keep up their firewall. They simply don't have enough people and the technology they need to do this." In a report issued last month, Amnesty ...