[tor-dev] Questions about censorship detection paper

[David Fifield]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 11:49:19PM +0000, John wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you, these pointers were very helpful. Do you know if there is
> some kind of resource that lists known censorship events? I'd like to
> see how good the approach from the paper does at identifying them.

For Tor-specific censorship, a list that is reasonably complete and up
to date is: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sa499/tor_timeline.pdf. It was
composed by mining the Tor issue tracker and blog for events.

For general censorship, I'm not aware of any systematic or complete list
of censorship events. There are quite a lot of research papers that
study one particular place for a period of time, and from them we know
of some incidents.

Here's a list of some measurement papers I'm aware of that might discuss
some events. You might also look at OpenNet and Freedom House reports.


Internet censorship in Iran: A first look
https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci13/workshop-program/presentation/aryan

The Anatomy of Web Censorship in Pakistan
https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci13/workshop-program/presentation/Nabi

Dimming the Internet: Detecting throttling as a mechanism of censorship in Iran
http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4361

Global Network Interference Detection Over the RIPE Atlas Network
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci14/foci14-anderson.pdf

Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2011/docs/p1.pdf

Characterizing Web Censorship Worldwide: Another Look at the OpenNet Initiative Data
http://censorbib.nymity.ch/pdf/Gill2015a.pdf