[ooni-talk] Cuba report on media censorship amid constitutional referendum

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

We published a new research report on the blocking of independent media
in Cuba amid the constitutional referendum last Sunday:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-referendum/

Some key findings include:

* Independent media Tremenda Nota (which covers women's rights, LGBTQI
and other human rights issues in Cuba) was blocked on the eve of the
referendum

* We observe that many other independent media websites (which have been
pushing for a "no" vote) were blocked leading up to and during the
referendum as well

* Cuba's only ISP (ETECSA) has changed its censorship techniques: they
have switched from serving blank block pages to now implementing
IP-based blocking, thus censoring access to websites that support HTTPS
as well

* ETECSA continues though to serve blank block pages for sites that have
not added HTTPS support

* Some media sites may have previously been blocked by Deep Packet
Inspection (DPI) technology, but they are now IP-blocked

* Some media sites were temporarily unblocked in January 2019 (and the
means of blocking changed thereafter), suggesting that ETECSA may have
made changes to its censorship equipment around that time

In the report, we share a graph (based on openly available OONI data)
which shows how the blocking of media changed in Cuba over the last ~2
years.

It seems that the OONI website (ooni.io) is now blocked in Cuba as well,
but ooni.torproject.org remains accessible.

We thank OONI Probe users in Cuba who made this study possible!

All the best,

OONI team.

-- 
Maria Xynou
Research & Partnerships Director
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/ooni-talk/attachments/20190227/fe48f497/attachment.sig>