[tor-project] Rapid response against censorship

isabela isabela at torproject.org
Fri Aug 19 18:51:41 UTC 2016


Hello Tor,

I took the freedom to create a project under the Community Team wiki
which is an attempt to create a rapid response program against
censorship events.

In the past months we did a little bit of that, by tweeting in PT to
people in Brazil teaching them to use Tor when Brazuka judge blocked
Whatsapp, we tweeted reaching out to Uganda folks also in an attempt to
get as many people to know about Tor as possible when the government was
blocking social media during the elections, and most recently we tweeted
in TR when the government blocked Social Media during the coup event
last month.

One might say: 'well if social media is blocked why you using to teach
people how to circumvent the blockade?'. What works here is the 'mouth
to mouth' outreach, while many in the country where the censorship event
might not be able to access social media, relatives and friends abroad
can still do it and they are in communication with those inside the
country. As an immigrant living abroad I can tell you that *it is a
thing*  I for instance called my family and told them to use orbot so we
could still talk with Whatsapp while the blockade was happening.

Of course we could do more and spread the word via email lists and other
venues and communication channels. We also could be more prepared and
have messages already translated in multiple languages so it's easier to
have something in the right language for the population we want to reach.

We can try to document these events and our actions to respond to it as
well e.g.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tracking-impact-whatsapp-blockage-tor

There is many things we could be building here to have such a program in
place!

I started this wiki:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/CommunityTeam/Projects/RapidResponse

Just to show how we can start organizing this things -- those phrases
there are just examples, not the real thing right now.

I was wondering if the Community Team and others would be into this idea
and would like to help improve that page.

Maybe we can even do it during the hacking day of the dev meeting!

What y'all think of that?
Cheers,

Isabela


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