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General
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- There are places where Tor is blocked, we need to strengthen the story
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- Need to make the network and techniques more resilient, and *also* improve the user experience
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- What should the scope of our anti-censorship team be?
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- PTs, BridgeDB/Bridges, Tor Browser UX, Rapid Response, Education / Advocacy, Relationships
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Strength
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- Tor Metrics and OONI identify use/blockages and generates report
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- Tor does work in many places with/without bridges!
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- Debugging / investigation does happen via individuals on Tor IRC, other channels
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- We have many things in Tor that deals with censorship circumvention user story
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- We have partners, researchers, communities that are working on this
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- Funding coming/available to focus on anti-censorship of Tor
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Weakness
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- We don't make censorship measurement actionable; we have piecemeal solutions, but not integrated
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- Don't have anyone on the team today to consume alerts/data/input
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- No public point of contact, collab around Tor censorship
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- Many censorship circumvention techniques are unmaintained, or not resourced enough
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- Pluggable Transports not actively maintained by anyone
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- Tor Browser UX is needed for users (ala bridge request / mote work)
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- Need to balance anonymity vs anti-censorship use cases and needs
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- PT development is mostly done outside of Tor, no ownership of productization side
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- People aren't aware of the Support portal, how can we work with partners with help desks to upstream support
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Opportunities
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- Create a known point of contact to report Tor censorship
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- Identity all countries where Tor is blocked, then research methodoligies, techniques, so we can respond
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- Rapid Response and Education Materials
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- Network Team is looking into this, but need to find way for good handoff to incoming anti-Censorship team/developer
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- Anti-Censorship Team should be connected/with the Network Team as onboarding/transition
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- Team should be broad and include community partners from PT community, Adversary lab, Guardian Project, etc other working on anti-censorship project
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- Adversary Lab tool can be used to analyze blocking, generate new forms of PT's
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- Need more PT / bridges, in more places
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- Create new easy packages for volunteer bridge operators
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- Anti-Censorship developer maybe should also be coordinator/manager of virtual/community team
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Threats
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- Mainstream ISPs in Mexico block Tor DirAuth, so they cannot run relays; home's can't run relays
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- ISPs blocking legitimate use of the network, because it looks like reselling the network connection
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- Anti-censorship event will likely happen within months, and we'll feel pressure from urgent situation
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- This needs to be prioritized and not subsumed by other things
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Questions
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- Do we have something in place if Tor is blocked in a place?
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-- We don't have a systematic, automated (realtime?) way
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-- Tor metrics graphs can show something odd (drop in connections, traffic)
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-- Some cases are annotated in trac list, or send out via mailing list
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-- OONI has tests for this, testing vanilla Tor, and bridges shipped in Tor Browser are blocked
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- What are challenges in automating alerts when there are spikes in Tor Metrics?
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-- There were some experimental stuff in anomaly detection, by several groups
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-- Nobody on the receiving side of the data; need humans to check for false positives
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-- Can we look at change in daily average users? No one watching those charts
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- What does "Rapid Response" mean?
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-- 1) figure out is it happening?
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-- 2) how/what is happening?
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-- 3) publish ways to work around through public communication
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-- .... 6) prevent this blocking from the future |