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The Tor Project's New Tool Aims To Map Out Internet Censorship

This article is more than 10 years old.

For years, the non-profit Tor Project has offered Internet users the world's most secure tool for dodging censorship and surveillance, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Now two of the project's researchers aim to help users to not only bypass what they call the "filternet"--the choked, distorted and censored subset of the Internet--but to understand it and map it out, the better to eradicate its restrictions.

Tor developers Arturo Filasto and Jacob Appelbaum are the co-creators of OONI-probe, an early-stage open-source software tool designed to be installed on any PC and run to collect data about local meddling with the computer's network connections, whether it be censorship, surveillance or selective bandwidth slowdowns. OONI, their acronym for the Open Observatory of Network Interference, aims to "show an accurate topology of network interference and censorship," as Filasto and Appelbaum describe the project in its documentation. "Through this topology, it will be possible to see what the internet looks like from nearly any location, including what sites are censored or have been tampered with."

Machines running OONI-probe run diagnostics like cycling through a list of website URLs or keywords to see which are blocked or filtered; A typical test checks the top one million Alexa-ranked sites, a process that takes close to a week. Or a collection of remotely networked machines running the software--linked together to create what Filasto and Appelbaum call the "OONI-net"--can run experiments that follow the path data takes to and from the test machines to check for filtering or slowdowns.

Tor's OONI project, funded in part with a grant from Radio Free Asia, isn't the first to monitor and measure Internet censorship around the world--other projects like the Open Net Initiative, the Berkman Center's HerdictWeb and Google's Transparency Report all aim to spot censorship and Internet slowdowns. But unlike those projects, OONI uses only open-source software and plans to make the raw data gathered by its tools public and accessible to any researcher.

"This came from a bit of disappointment over the fact that all the existing tools out there for monitoring censorship were either not using open methodologies or not making their data available," says Filasto, a 21-year old computer science student at Rome's Sapienza university. "Our goal with OONI is to build that open framework,  so that researchers can independently prove that the methodology is valid and repeat the tests."

Anyone can volunteer to run OONI-probe, and the data from the software's tests will be collected on OONI.nu for analysis. Filasto says the project has also partnered with M-Labs, a research spin-off from Google that runs software on servers around the world aimed at measuring the Internet's flow of data and detecting anomalies.

Filasto warns that the software is still in an early stage of its development, with no easy user interface and lots of "ugly" code. But it's already helped reveal undocumented censorship in real cases. On a recent trip to the U.S., Filasto discovered that his prepaid T-Mobile phone ran software called "Web Guard" that blocked certain sites based on what it says is violent or sexual content. But after connecting his phone to a PC with a USB cable and running OONI-probe on it, he discovered it also blocked access to everything from a British financial advice site to a 9/11-focused conspiracy site, to a Japanese URL shortening service.

Last week, the Palestinian news agency Ma'an used OONI-probe to reveal that the Palestinian Authority was demanding that the local Internet service provider censor access to opposition political sites and news sites. The Palestinian Authority minister responsible resigned three days later.

George Hale, the reporter for Ma'an who exposed the story, says he suspected the Palestinian Authority's censorship before he used Tor's tool, but that by showing that only political sites were inaccessible, Ma'an was able to prove that the blockages were politically-motivated, not random. "We found the [censored] sites through guesswork and interviews with government officials, but the OONI probe was really important for the opposite reason," says Hale. "By confirming these were the only sites [blocked], it made the politically motivated effort that more apparent. And this helped point us to the likely culprit."

The Palestinian example shows the value of Filasto's and Appelbaum's more scientific approach to the problem of censorship--collecting comprehensive data rather than piecemeal anecdotes about what's being blocked online. "It's based around the concept of experiment and control," says Filasto. "Experiment on the network you wish to measure and compare it with the control, which is your expected results. If there’s a mismatch, it's likely a censorship event is happening."

Check out the OONI project here.