As the opening of the Olympic Games draws the world's collective attention to the most populace country on earth, there will be many millions of us watching on the tube, some though will be watching the the events unfold via the series of 'pipes and tubes' we call internet. This incredibly liberating and powerful medium, which we now take for granted in the west, is still completely censored and walled off by the host nation.

Fear not, the rescue party is on its way. A renegade group of volunteer hackers led by Michael Horn, based in Germany, called the Chaos Computer Club (ccc.de) can breach the great firewall. The hackers are launching a toolkit to help journalists access Western websites while they are cut off from the rest of the world and sit behind what the Chinese authorities refer to as the 'Golden Shield.'

The Chaos Computer toolkit will be made available to journalists on a USB key that the CCC is calling the Freedom Stick. The system is quite simple the kit allows journalists to log on to a 'Tor' allowing access to anonymous servers outside the Great Firewall. All the reporters need to do is use encrypted access codes to hop-on and off the servers and keep these away from the authorities.

The Western agencies have plenty of options, including mirrored websites, Torconnected servers, having news articles converted to computerized speech and read over a Skype channel, and even producing a digest of the daily news that could be distributed on BitTorrent.

I know we're all supposed to ignore politics around the games, though I've never quite understood this noble ideal, as if the games operate in a vacuum, please that's just ridiculous. According to the Open Net Initiative (opennet.net), which monitors state surveillance and filtering online, the Chinese authorities are still using blocking techniques to stop access to sites when users search on certain keywords. What is not clear is whether everyone, and not just journalists, in China has access to the sites that have been opened, nor whether they will remain available after the games are over.

CCC cannot breach the wall alone and will need some help. Those agencies wishing to donate a portion of their bandwidth here's a guide to help set up a Tor node. The more Tor nodes there are, the better the network's performance will be and the more difficult it will be for the authorities to defend the firewall.

We shall see how this movement unfolds, but the next revolution in China could begin in earnest on the web over the next couple of weeks. Let's hope so.