AntiCensorshipRapidResponse

censorship can mean many things

• blocking tor or its bridges
• also websites, messaging apps
• anything, really

complex: how do you measure? how do you respond to it?

ooni has "tor weather" analysis that looks at bootstrap time in particular countries for vanilla tor

we rely on user input to figure out that something is blocked

• user in china informed us about snowflake blocking
• ooni's slack channel has a fairly technical person from china
• we almost always have the same questions for users and a tool should be able to answer them -> ooni probe would be helpful here

often not completely sure what we do in response to a censorship event

• we have several tickets where we have some info and then we no longer know what to do (metrics/censorship category)

standard set of guidelines for people would be useful

lots of open helpdesk tickets that are unanswered

• nobody taking care of helpdesk at the moment

would be good to move forward with "censorship table" in the short run

we could use ripe atlas's traceroute test to scan bridges

• does not cover every country extensively but it's a good start

eventually, it would be great to dynamically create a list of bridges to test

• in the beginning, a static list would be fine
• we may also want some config knobs that we can adjust
• make it easy for ooni to get a bridge from bridgedb
  • we can do it manually in the beginning
  • eventually, it should be automated
  • how would we accomplish this?

ooni's probe orchestration is opt-in

• backend can tell probes when it's time to censor

currently, probes learn test lists from backend at runtime

from measurement to publishing, <24h are necessary

• processing takes time
• ooni did some work on the "fast path"
• idea is to be able to respond in, ideally, 5-10 minutes
• measurement axes are time, geo coverage, website coverage
  • pick two out of three
• should help a censorship alert system
  • user subscribes to country and get alert when something happens

where does it stop being rapid response and turns into "working on the problem"?

• matter of detection and confirmation
• "what should our role be?"
  • ooni works on both advocacy and technical work

rapid response should also involve circumvention

• if you don't help with that quickly, it won't be very useful later on
• timeliness also important for outreach and advocacy
  • nobody cares about old news
  • if you respond too quickly your work may be inaccurate
  • question is how we can support each other effectively to strike the right balance
  • however, even if you're late, there's still value. you feed into ongoing activities
  • big liability risk if you get your results wrong

ooni has "events calendar" that helps them be prepared

• it's outdated at this point, though
• censorship often correlated with elections
• "censorship measurement campaign" -> recruit ooni users before the elections
• censorship also correlate with protests

ooni slack channel is used for notifications

groups have their own whatsapp groups from where we can learn about censorship

we want to be faster and more confident in our results

• we don't want to wait 24h
• ooni also publishes results so people can write their own reports based on ooni's data

once tor testing is part of probes, we can compare it to reachability of other websites

• "can i reach tor but not wikipedia"?

have a torproject user at pirate bay with a bunch of tor browser seeds

• concern is that highly-rated seeds are outdated tor browsers
• we need some kind of trusted uploader

only a few countries block tor

• some block and then unblock
• need relations with technologies on the ground

are things getting blocked and we just don't hear about it?

• we may do ok on a country level but not at an isp level
• keepiton mailing list useful

censorship shouldn't only be available to highly technical people

bridgedb distribution should take into account where user is coming from

• we don't have information that says what bridge is necessary in what country

are censors reacting to ooni probes?

• some countries are blocking ooni.io (egypt)
• in many countries ooni.torproject.org is blocked because of torproject.org blocking

you cannot avoid burning bridges but you can reason about the rate they get burnt. it's a question of experimental design.

if we were the censor we wouldn't surveil ooni probe traffic but rather run the client ourselves