From the Article:

Psiphon will be a key tool for the relatively small but highly influential group of outspoken journalists, bloggers and activists inside China

Notice this is not freedom for all Chinese citizens? Just the elite, ararchists and activists. If this worked so well, why not bring it to everyone?

These are admitted criminals. And somehow, they have tapped into the protected financial network of a major credit card company, and they are going to use a P2P proxy network to channel traffic over that protected network?

Sorry, but I think this is a smokescreen so Internet Anarchists can tap a protected financial network and try to get away with it. I would believe that it is more likely that they will spread a trojan horse program designed to take down credit card companies by flooding that network with bogus packets. These guys don’t give a damn about the Chinese citizens, only their own delusions of grandeur in finding ways to use the Internet to bring down capitalism.

“Unlike most Internet traffic, Psiphon data is encrypted and shoots around the world on a network reserved for secure financial transactions, so a censor cannot see what the person is accessing. And a censor wouldn’t be able to tell a Psiphon request from a MasterCard purchase.”

I thin this is a smokescreen for a few crackers to have a go at the Mastercard protected financial network. And how exactly are Psiphon hosts supposed to connect to this network? Is there a single node master somewhere upstream that has both an internet connection and a connection to this protected network? Also, what if China begins to use its considerable resources to crack the encryption on this network? Is no one else concerned that China may be forced to try to crack Mastercard’s network encryption scheme?

This is a bad idea by a few internet ararchists who do not have the best of intentions in mind for Chinese citizens, much less American citizens.

Regarding RIAA and MPAA – why is a Republican administration so concerned with protecting the copyrights of the liberal entertainers? A little payback might be in order here.

First, this is a Peer to Peer encrypted proxy service. It can probably be adapted to share copyrighted files too, and if so, RIAA and others will be quick to ban it or sue it out of existence.

Secondly, even encrypted programs leave tell-tale traces across the wire that administrators can detect. Skype can be detected with intrusion detection systems. This new app will likely be detected too. And the penalty in China for using outlawed software? Well, they could be branded as a hacker and the sentence for that is harsh. Sometimes its death.

China will easily respond to any attempts to bypass its own authorized proxy services. If you own a webserver, you will have to have it licensed in China. Any port 80 connections to any host that is not licensed or authorized, will be dealt with swiftly, and probably harshly.

Sorry, this is not the solution to Chinese censorship you were hoping for.

“The impact of government censorship on Internet freedoms of China’s citizens has been overstated.”

I have a closer view on the internet censorship in Iran/statistics:
http://sugiero.blogspot.com/2006/04/internet-filtering-and-censorship-in.html