Hello,
We published a report documenting recent censorship events in Belarus amid ongoing protests.
Our report is available here: https://ooni.org/post/2020-belarus-internet-outages-website-censorship/
We prepared this report in collaboration with folks from Human Constanta and the Digital Observers Community Belarus.
At least 86 websites appear to have been blocked in Belarus over the last month, according to OONI network measurement data. These include news media, political opposition, pro-democracy, and election related websites, as well as communication and circumvention tool sites.
We observe a variance in blocking both in terms of which websites are blocked across ISPs (i.e. different sites blocked on different networks), as well as in terms of censorship techniques.
In some cases, when sites are hosted on HTTP, we see that ISPs serve a blockpage. But when sites are hosted on encrypted HTTPS, we observe interference during the TLS handshake (after the TCP connection and before the HTTP request), resulting in a connection reset error.
As blocking appears to be implemented during the TLS handshake, this suggests that Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology is likely being used. It seems likely that the SNI is being used to decide whether to block or let connections go through.
These findings are limited to our analysis of OONI measurements collected from multiple ISP networks in Belarus between 1st August 2020 to 3rd September 2020, and exclude websites which received limited testing coverage during this period.
Further details are available in our report, where we also share our analysis and relevant OONI measurements.
This study can be expanded upon through the use of OONI Probe (https://ooni.org/install/) and OONI data (https://ooni.org/data/).
We thank all OONI Probe users in Belarus who made this study possible.
Please help share our research: https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/1306210370516910082
Thanks,
Maria.