Here is an early brainstorming list of the scope for our future
anti-censorship team. Let us know if we left out a critical category.
And of course once we have actual team members I expect they will take
this initial roadmap and do something even smarter than this list. :)
(1) BridgeDB:
- Automated monitoring
- Understand current usage patterns, consider improving the design
Don't get obfs4 bridges blocked by other transports (#28655)
(2) Pluggable Transports:
- Improve the PT interface with Tor, to pass logs etc (#25502)
[with network team]
- Tor Browser can use other circumvention tools as proxies (#28556)
[with browser team]
- Specific PTs:
Maintain obfs4proxy (like fixing the iat bug that let Kazakhstan block it)
Snowflake
Httpsproxy
Marionette
Domain front through community sites
- Talk to research groups to keep in touch about their PT research work
(3) Improve Tor user experience for users in censored / crappy networks:
- Gettor: automated monitoring and automated updates. Improve UX.
- Understanding and reducing client time to bootstrap [with network team]
and other parameters that are tuned poorly for slow networks
(4) Understand Tor censorship:
- Tor Browser network testing mode (#23839, #28531) [with browser team]
- Reachability scanning for the default (shipped in Tor Browser) bridges
[with ooni]
- Understand bridge load and bridge blocking (e.g. fix user counting bugs
that are making our Turkey count wrong) [with network / metrics teams]
(5) Help users use bridges:
- Help NGOs get their users on bridges (#28015, #28526)
- Tor Browser *automates* picking the right PTs [with browser team]
(6) Community outreach and integration: [with community team]
- [Initial list of outreach partner NGOs elided for now, since some of
them have opsec needs to keep their people safe]