[proposal] Create an open source protocol for Tor and censorship investigation
Earlier this year, during an in-person meeting, we discussed the importance of educating and empowering communities to investigate online censorship and find ways to circumvent it. Some participants highlighted the success of forums like ntc.party, where a self-organized community connects circumvention tool developers with users. This raised the question: how can we foster the creation of similar communities in other regions? Considering how to empower Tor users and developers, I proposed adapting the Berkeley Protocol to develop an open source protocol for investigating censorship events, particularly those against the Tor ecosystem (vanilla Tor, bridges, pluggable transports, etc).
We know that censorship tests, including Tor reachability tests, have limitations and are often prone to false positives and other errors. For example, users might report that Tor is blocked, but the issue could be an overloaded or slow bridge rather than censorship.
This week, we published a framework also inspired by the Berkeley Protocol for conducting network health investigations, which is open for discussion here: tpo/community/policies#25 (closed). But, as we said in the document:"Investigations of other types of network incidents, like censorship events, are out of scope of this proposal, even though they might want to follow the framework outlined here as well."
Although this is not part of any sponsored project, I’d like to begin drafting this open source investigation protocol for anti-censorship & Tor. Discussing VPNs and website block methodologies are out of scope of this guide. It must be primarily a guide on how to investigate censorship against Tor.
I thought we could follow the same document structure as the Network Health proposal and adapt it to meet anti-censorship needs. Thoughts?
References
- Framework for running Tor Network Health investigations tpo/community/policies#25 (closed)
- Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations https://humanrights.berkeley.edu/publications/berkeley-protocol-on-digital-open-source-investigations/
- https://ntc.party
- magma guide! https://magma.lavafeld.org/
- OONI Tor Test - https://ooni.org/nettest/tor/ and spec: https://github.com/ooni/spec/blob/master/nettests/ts-023-tor.md
