Is there any sort of criminal risk to playing cat and mouse with GFW censorship? Or are you generally free to just do your best to subvert the limitations put in place?
A quote from someone I know working in a related agency for “cybercrime” in China:
> If you just set it up and use it yourself, at most you will just be given a verbal warning and urged to rectify and confiscate the tools. If you set it up and give it to your friends to use, there may be risks, but in reality, law enforcement agencies usually don't have extra time to manage these small things. If you set it up for your friends to use, the traffic of three or five people is very small, just normal access to the external network, and there is no other illegal behavior such as money laundering, telecommunications fraud, etc. No one cares. If you are the airport owner, that is, the VPN commercial service provider, then your legal risk will be very high, you will be involved in illegal operation of telecommunications services, because this requires you to apply for a license, and VPN commercial service providers usually earn large illegal income, may be sentenced and confiscated for several years. Note that the sentence is due to its illegal operation. Once he has the qualifications, then he will be a legal communication service.
> Because such behavior can be subject to administrative penalties at most in the law, which is what I just said, warnings or orders to make corrections and confiscate tools, and at most fines, but generally not. The fine will be determined based on your attitude of admitting your mistakes. If your attitude is good, there will basically be no fine. In addition, if there is illegal income to be confiscated, such as illegal income obtained by browsing the Internet and conducting cross-border money laundering or cross-border telecommunications fraud or computer network crimes with international illegal organizations, it will be confiscated.
Funnily enough, he says almost everyone used VPN-like technologies, even within the regulatory agencies.
> If you just set it up and use it yourself, at most you will just be given a verbal warning and urged to rectify and confiscate the tools. If you set it up and give it to your friends to use, there may be risks, but in reality, law enforcement agencies usually don't have extra time to manage these small things. If you set it up for your friends to use, the traffic of three or five people is very small, just normal access to the external network, and there is no other illegal behavior such as money laundering, telecommunications fraud, etc. No one cares. If you are the airport owner, that is, the VPN commercial service provider, then your legal risk will be very high, you will be involved in illegal operation of telecommunications services, because this requires you to apply for a license, and VPN commercial service providers usually earn large illegal income, may be sentenced and confiscated for several years. Note that the sentence is due to its illegal operation. Once he has the qualifications, then he will be a legal communication service.
> Because such behavior can be subject to administrative penalties at most in the law, which is what I just said, warnings or orders to make corrections and confiscate tools, and at most fines, but generally not. The fine will be determined based on your attitude of admitting your mistakes. If your attitude is good, there will basically be no fine. In addition, if there is illegal income to be confiscated, such as illegal income obtained by browsing the Internet and conducting cross-border money laundering or cross-border telecommunications fraud or computer network crimes with international illegal organizations, it will be confiscated.
Funnily enough, he says almost everyone used VPN-like technologies, even within the regulatory agencies.