[ooni-talk] Bridge reachability, Iran measurements & Network Interference Consortium (OONI - CPP discussion)

[Arturo Filastò]

Hi all,

As promised here is the summary of what we talked about in the call
between OONI and Choke Point Project.

People present: Ruben, Laurier, Pascal, vmon, Arturo.

The goal of this conversation was to establish a collaboration between
OONI and CPP. CPP is a team of experts in data analysis and
visualization and they will be working on analyzing the results of OONI
tests.

We talked about what was said related to OONI during the Tor Developer
meeting in Paris.

The main topics covered were:

## Bridge reachability measurements

We are going to be conducting some bridge reachability measurements from
China, Iran and the US for assessing which bridges are working and which
are not.

US will be used as a control to verify that the bridge is blocked and
not simply offline.

The list of bridges to be tested will be composed of both the public
bridges and a set of 10 bridges that are not given out to anybody. This
will allow us to understand if by conducting measurements we are giving
to the censor addresses of bridge.

The Tor master trac ticket related to this project is:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12544

We will probably start collecting data on this starting in Septemeber 2014.

Since March 2014 till July 2014 we have some data on bridge reachability
from Russia, China and the US. This data is not very complete and
contains some bugs due to not having proper monitoring infrastructure in
place and the fact that the machines running the probes are very out of
date (who the hell still uses Fedora 8!?).

The OONI team agreed to give access to the CPP team this data so that
they can start looking and it and figuring out how to process and
visualize it.

In this project CPP agreed to work on data analytics and visualization.

## Iran Measurements

This project is aimed at collecting some data on network interference in
Iran.

Vmon will be speaking to some organizations active in Iran to acquire
some machines for doing some testing.

We will then design a test deck suitable for Iran:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12578

When we have collected enough data this will be handed over to the CPP
team for analytics and visualization.

Once that is done we will produce a shiny report on what are the
findings and conclusions.


## Network interference consortium

We talked a bit about the notion of having a consortium that will be
monitoring the status of network interference in the world.

The conclusion was that we should start out by trying our proposed
workflow on a specific country with a small team of people. Once that is
done we should start bringing in partners from other organizations.

These are the graphics that were produced during the tor developer meeting:

Organizational roles:
https://ooni.torproject.org/media/OONI%20Consortium%20graphics.pdf

Workflow:
https://ooni.torproject.org/media/OONI%20Consortium%20graphics%20-%20workflow.pdf


## Weekly meeting

We agreed to have weekly meetings on IRC every Friday at 5 PM CET (11 AM
EST).

The meetings will start on August 1st and they will be held on the #ooni
channel on irc.oftc.net.

Everybody is invited!

## Communication channels

We agreed that all communications should happen on public mailing lists
(https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-dev/ and
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-talk/).

For communication that could contain sensitive information we should use
email with an explicit cc list.

If you think I forgot something please be sure to fill in the gaps.

Have fun,

~ Art.