[ooni-dev] On the ethics of soliciting measurements and informed consent

[Philipp Winter]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 02:27:47PM +0100, Arturo Filastò wrote:
> Your research is very interesting and I believe very important for
> getting more data when it would just be too risky to have network
> vantage. I do think, though, that we can't rely only on these sorts of
> measurements.
> They complement and extend what we measure from the network vantage
> point of the user, but may not work as reliably in all censorship
> systems and only give you a subset of the information we are interested
> in acquiring.

I think that Roya was advocating, like you suggest, for idle scans to
complement OONI's tests.  While idle scans are limited to the network
and transport layer, many of OONI's tests are on the application layer.

As for integrating the idle scan code into OONI: I worked a little bit
with Roya on this project and have some understanding of the code.
Integrating it would involve quite a bit of work but is not impossible.
Idle scans also require an IP spoofing-capable machine, which can be
difficult to organise since most ISPs do egress filtering.

Cheers,
Philipp