[tor-bugs] #28531 [Community/Outreach]: Make a snapshot of what PTs are needed for successful Tor use in each country

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#28531: Make a snapshot of what PTs are needed for successful Tor use in each
country
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     Reporter:  arma                |      Owner:  alison
         Type:  task                |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium              |  Milestone:
    Component:  Community/Outreach  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal              |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                      |  Parent ID:
       Points:                      |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:  Sponsor19           |
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 Several countries have deployed censorship that includes trying to block
 Tor in various ways. And places change their censorship over time. What
 does the big picture look like today?

 We have a scattering of resources on this topic currently, e.g.:

 * OONI has "vanilla Tor" measurements in some countries.

 * We have anecdotal stories from talking to users in various places.

 * There's the censorship wiki:
 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/censorshipwiki
 (#6149)

 * metrics-timeline has something similar:
 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MetricsTimeline

 * And the Berkeley folks wrote up their own Tor censorship timeline:
 https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sadia/tor_timeline.pdf

 But what is the situation, this month, in every country? Which ones block
 the Tor directory authorities, which ones block the public relays, which
 ones block the default (i.e. included in tor browser) bridges, which ones
 enumerate bridges from bridges.torproject.org and block them by IP
 address, which ones use DPI to detect and cut various pluggable transport
 connections, which ones throttle protocols they don't want, etc?

 When Venezuela's CANTV ISP did their IP address based blocking, they also
 blocked the default obfs4 bridges, which led to confusion and then
 unfortunate headlines like the one from Access: "Venezuela blocks Tor".
 (Tor worked fine if you got a fresh bridge, even a vanilla bridge.)

 In Taipei I talked to some central asia experts who told me about how Tor
 only works in a degraded way in Belarus in the default configuration
 "because a few years ago they blocked all the relay IP addresses, but they
 haven't updated their block since then".

 We need up-to-date information about Tor blocking to provide advice to our
 users when they ask for support, and also we want it for preemptively
 including good advice in Tor Launcher's UI. Knowing historical trends will
 help us prioritize the development of new pluggable transports vs new
 distribution methods of existing transports.

 So, how do we get this information?

 One option is that in the glorious future, the standard OONI decks will
 have all of these tools built-in. But that future is a long way off, and
 maybe it should never even arrive, since some Tor transports are huge and
 have no business being bundled into a little mobile testing app.

 I think we instead want some combination of the following two plans:

 * We have on-the-ground contacts in many countries, and it's often not
 just individuals but whole NGOs full of Tor enthusiasts. We should pull
 together our knowledge of who we know in each place, and ask them what
 they think the current situation is in their country, and talk to them
 regularly. We can prioritize the various countries that we think were,
 are, or might be trying to block Tor. Having these on-the-ground experts
 is going to be necessary no matter what else we add to the plan, and it's
 why I picked 'community outreach' as the ticket component.

 * We should build automated tools to assist people in assessing Tor
 censorship on their network -- to increase the accuracy of reports that we
 get, and to make the reports come with actual data that we can compare
 over time. This idea is #23839.

 This ticket is for pulling together one big-picture report. But once we
 have one, we will want to find ways of keeping ourselves up to date over
 time.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28531>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
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