About Us



Who We Are, and What We Do


This is the homepage of Garden Networks for Freedom of Information, a non-profit organization. We provide free software to access Internet content blocked by totalitarian countries such as China and to protect Internet users' online privacy and security against Internet monitoring and censorship in those areas of the world.

Read our report on China's GoldenShield Censorship System.


The Objectives

 
1. Raise awareness of internet-related human rights violations among the general public by organizing and/or participating in related public events, forums, and activities.

2. Help to establish and promote ethical values and humanitarian principles in the technical venue; encourage technology suppliers to respect internet users’ human rights and ensure the healthy development of internet technologies.

3. Make continuous efforts in the research and development of cutting-edge technologies to help people inside countries with censorship on internet, such as the Golden Shield in P. R. China, to access blocked information freely and express themselves safely. Participate in educating local communities about the development of internet technologies.
 

The History

 
The effort was started by a group of engineers in year 2001 in order to provide Internet users in P.R.China access to the web sites blocked by the China's GoldenShield internet censorship and jamming systems. Later in that year the first version of the client software "Garden" was made available for free, and released to a mailing list of about 1000 users, members of which were interested in accessing the blocked content from oversea web sites.

Along the years, hundreds of thousands of people are using Garden Networks as their daily tools to access the blocked content on Internet and to protect themselves from being monitored by China's Internet police.

Garden and its backend system was the first intelligent proxy system that aimed at breaking through China's Internet censorship, and providing Internet users with priacy and online security.

Many new jamming and filtering methods have been deployed by China's GoldShield Internet Censorship System trying to interrupt anti-jamming service, including blocking our server IP, attacking our servers, messing with DNS (Domain Name System) systems and modifying TCP/IP (Internet Protocol) behavior . Garden Network's systems survived all these improved blocking technologies with the help of our great users.

What our users say

  • Air is free; water is free, why isn’t the Internet?
  • Garden provides us with a breath of fresh air! People are being suffocated under high pressure. You do not know how much we need your help.
  • It is your hard effort that gives us a sky of real freedom!
  • The day I found out about Garden was the happiest day in my life.