How to tunnel your internet traffic through another country
A guide for those escaping regional restrictions against access to the free web.
For decades now, Western society has decried the censorship and restriction of internet usage in countries like China, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, deploying catchy and memetic phrases like “Great Firewall of China” to rightly criticize the limitations these nations have placed on access to the global internet. While national intranets exist in these places, information and communication is controlled to shape political trends.
Yet now, Western countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, and soon my very own Canada, are rolling out strict Photo ID requirements to access the internet. Australians will have to attach their Photo ID to their social media account, destroying any semblance of anonymity. Britons will be forced to attach their Photo ID to any pornography they browse online, giving the government a window into their most private and vulnerable fantasies. And now Canada seeks to pursue similar laws to their cohort of Commonwealth realms.
What the West has condemned when performed by Second World nations, they now eagerly embrace themselves. Politicians have explicitly stated that privacy must now be sacrificed “for the safety of children”, yet it is patently obvious that you cannot determine who is a child without obtaining the private information of virtually everyone who uses the internet.
And even if you could magically separate the adults from the children without learning any of their private information—which you can’t—have we considered that children also have a right to access the internet? They deserve to be safe, of course, and they should have guidance from their parents on how to be responsible on the internet at their respective age level.
But we must recognize that access to the internet, the ability to learn from all the grand sources of knowledge and to share your thoughts and beliefs with others across the world, is a fundamental human right, the basic freedom to learn and speak made manifest in the digital age. And the intention of politicians to propagandize our youth and limit their access to objective knowledge is only confirmed by Hillary Clinton’s assertion last December that the problem the United States has with TikTok is that it showed young people proof of Israeli war crimes in Gaza and made them sympathetic to Palestine.
That, in itself, should tell you that this is no innocent measure to “protect children”, but instead a devious ploy to limit your freedom. So wherever you live, if you’re looking to escape regional content and access restrictions for websites, and assert your right to connect with the rest of humanity, to learn about the world as it really is and not as your politicians have told you, then this is your quick and easy guide to tunnel your internet traffic through another country.
Step One: Rent a Virtual Private Server
In order to tunnel your internet traffic, we’re going to create a Virtual Private Network (VPN), an encrypted tunnel between the connected device and a network in another place. This technology has many legitimate uses, as it’s necessary for remote workers to securely connect to offices, and for multi-office organizations to bridge their campuses into one virtual network. I personally use one for this publication when I’m away from my home office, so that I can access and save all the data I store on my local server such as photographs and interview recordings.
Because of this, only the most authoritarian countries can limit VPN usage at the current moment in time. They’ll require more advanced techniques than this article can cover, but for countries that are having individual websites check based on the location of your device, a VPN is a perfect solution, as you can tunnel your phone or computer’s internet traffic through a country that doesn’t have those limits. While I’m currently located in Canada, I could easily make my traffic route through a country like Iceland. And if in the future Iceland adopts a similar Photo ID policy, then you pick a new VPN out of a different country instead.
There are many people who will use commercial VPN services like Mullvad for this purpose, but I would recommend against paying for someone else’s VPN. These companies play a constant cat-and-mouse game of having their servers blocked by malicious actors, only to obtain new servers until those are blocked as well. You also run the significant risk of commercial VPN operators keeping logs of your browsing history, as the encrypted tunnel only protects you from third-parties; the server you’re connecting to over VPN sees everything you do.
As an individual, your own private VPN will be much more inconspicuous, as it won’t have a massive volume of traffic from around the world, and can be hosted on a normal cloud server from a mainstream company that won’t have their IP address range blocked. So for Step One of this guide, you’ll simply need to rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from one of the many, many cloud providers that offers it. The important thing is that whichever VPS provider you pick, ensure their datacentre hosting you is in a country that doesn’t enforce Photo ID for internet access; going from one censored place to another won’t help you!
If you pay in cash or with a regulated bank, then your anonymity will be pierced at this stage, but this may be okay with you if you’re going to use your VPN to engage with the internet under your real name and “stand on business” as the kids put it. If you are seeking anonymity, though, then there are VPSs that can be rented with privacy-preserving cryptocurrency like Monero. In either event, read the terms of service for your VPS provider to ensure they allow you to host a VPN on your server, and make sure you stay within the bandwidth limitations of your pricing plan. Once the VPS is acquired, move on to Step Two.
Step Two: Install WireGuard
At the end of Step One, you should have access to a VPS running some form of Linux. The exact flavour doesn’t matter, as long as it has a command line and the ability to install software packages. There is only a single tool that you will need to install and configure on the VPS, and then you will be able to connect to it using any computer or phone of your choosing.
WireGuard is open-source software, built up by various contributors over the years into an extremely robust and secure VPN solution, and licensed for free to the entire world, not charging even a single penny. The benefit of the open-source nature of the code is that, if a security flaw exists, it will not be hidden, but rather discovered and then patched out by the community. In proprietary software, a flaw can be concealed by malicious actors, as the code cannot be read by the public and thus is harder for security researchers to root out. As such, let me assure you that WireGuard is one of the safest programs you can install on your device, and even safer as long as you keep it regularly updated.
Depending on your device and operating system, installing WireGuard will follow various different processes. Thankfully, by looking at the WireGuard install page, you can easily pick the option that works best for your devices. For your client, you can download a Windows installer or use the Mac, iOS or Android apps available on those devices stores. For your VPS, you’ll use this same page, and it will tell you what to type into the command-line interface in order to install WireGuard with your package manager. Regardless of whether your Linux flavour is Debian, Fedora, Arch, or another thing, your server will have a version of WireGuard you can install.
Once you have installed WireGuard on both your VPS and your computer or phone, you will be ready to proceed to the third and final step, where you will use WireGuard to bridge the encrypted tunnel between you and the free and open web. Exciting!
Step Three: Jack In to the Net
On both your VPS and your client devices, you’ll need to generate public and private keys, and through a mathematically-secure process known as asymmetric cryptography, use them to create the encrypted WireGuard tunnel. First, generate keys on the Linux command line on your VPS. Then, use the graphic user interface on your client app, be it a computer or a phone, and import the .conf file storing your VPS’s connection settings.
Once both your VPS and client have the configuration set, all that’s left to do is turn on the WireGuard VPN, and jack in. If it’s working right, your phone or computer will now be sending all internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to your VPS in another country. You will be able to turn your WireGuard VPN on and off at your leisure, in case you need to access something on your local network instead of through your VPS, like a printer or a TV streaming box.
This, right here, is the end of your easy step-by-step process to find internet freedom. By routing all your internet traffic through your new, self-built VPN, you can evade regional restrictions on information and communications, and enjoy the full wealth and bounty of the greatest repository of human knowledge ever built.
So whether you’re a teenager seeking to assert your rights in a world that sees you as merely the property of your parents, or an adult who simply has no patience for “showing your papers” to the government, you have the full power and means to seize back control.
It is time to transcend the censorship regimes that seek to divorce humanity from itself. Civilization exists in the blips of light that stream across the hundreds of undersea cables, sending our hopes and dreams blazing across the world. Every single human being has citizenship in cyberspace as their birthright, and it is the connections we forge with each other that will prove the ultimate salvation of the human soul, regardless of the cynics and pessimists who seek division.
The internet is free. It will remain free. Glory to the Web.