[tor-project] Notes from October 19 2017 Vegas team meeting

[Maria Xynou]

Dear Niels and everyone else who has concerns with the OONI team using
GSuite,

Thank you for sharing your concerns.

As privacy advocates, we very much understand your concerns. I
personally understand your concerns, having hosted multiple "How to
de-Googlize your life" workshops for the public over the last years and
having investigated Alphabet as part of my previous job.

However, I'm sure you understand that (for better or for worse) life is
full of trade-offs that we all inevitably need to take into account when
striving to do our jobs the best that we can.

Our job - our as in OONI - is that of enabling people around the world
to measure internet censorship.

To this end, our small team of only 4 (!) developers design, build, and
maintain the following software components:

1. OONI Probe (i.e. multiple free software tests designed to measure
internet censorship)

2. Backend for OONI Probe

3. OONI Probe web UI

4. OONI Probe mobile app for Android

5. OONI Probe mobile app for F-Droid

6. OONI Probe mobile app for iOS

7. OONI Probe distribution for Raspberry Pis

8. OONI data processing pipeline

9. Proteus (probe orchestration)

10. OONI Run

11. OONI Explorer

12. OONI API

I think it's clear that our small team is building and maintaining a lot
of software and services. And over the next year, OONI will be building
and maintaining much more software, so the list will go on.

In addition to the above, we also ensure that our servers are up and
running so that we can provide daily updates on internet censorship
based on data collected from more than 200 countries. We also write
research reports, do data analysis, and many more activities.

And so while we're not particularly happy about GSuite, we see it as a
necessary (and temporary?) solution. We simply don't have the resources
to maintain an email server (and ensure it's properly secured).

We can of course be reached via encrypted PGP email, and many do so. I
should probably emphasize that we receive a fair amount of emails from
Gmail users. And when it comes to really sensitive communications, we
obviously don't use email.

All the best,

Maria.

On 22/10/2017 20:41, Niels Elgaard Larsen wrote:
>
> Iain R. Learmonth:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 22/10/17 11:39, Arturo Filastò wrote about moving to GSuite.
>>
>> Just to add to this, for those that are still concerned. The OONI
>> website does list a GPG key that can be used to send encrypted emails
>> that are not readable by Google:
>
> And I am still concerned.
> How much of the email is PGP encrypted?
>
>
>> https://ooni.torproject.org/about/
>>
>> Setting up a mail server is easy, but keeping a mail server running,
>> keeping a lid on spam and preventing your mail server from ending up in
>> reputation systems as "spammy" is a constant struggle.
> It is really not that hard.
>
> And even if some russian spamservice would mark Tor-emails as potential
> spam, is that reason enough to give it to Google?
>
>
>> While it is sad that Google has been chosen, I can well understand the
>> reasoning behind doing so.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Iain.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> tor-project at lists.torproject.org
>> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
>>
>
>
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-- 
Maria Xynou
Research and Partnerships Coordinator
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI)
https://ooni.torproject.org/
PGP Key Fingerprint: 2DC8 AFB6 CA11 B552 1081 FBDE 2131 B3BE 70CA 417E

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