CENSORS
by Belarus
Synonyms: BY
3 findings tagged here
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Bridge usage statistics fail to detect censorship for low-use bridges: in a Belarus 2020–2021 case study, email-distributed obfs4 bridges that were actively blocked regularly received 0 connections from Belarus even on unblocked days, making censorship-vs-inactivity indistinguishable. A censor can also artificially inflate counts by making its own connections from multiple IP addresses, so high connection counts do not imply absence of censorship.
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Censored Planet measurements of psiphon.ca in AS6697 (Belarus) around the August 2020 Internet shutdown showed that Psiphon was initially blocked via connection timeouts during the shutdown itself, and then—several weeks after the shutdown ended—the censorship mechanism shifted to TCP RST injection. Outcome-typed measurement data made this two-phase mechanism change immediately visible without re-collecting any raw data.
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During the Belarus Internet shutdown of August 9, 2020, Censored Planet Echo measurements showed an increase of two orders of magnitude in test measurements failing at the TCP connection stage on the first day of the shutdown, alongside an order of magnitude increase in failed control measurements on the same day. Without comparing test measurements against control measurements that are expected to succeed regardless of content, these failures are indistinguishable from targeted website-level censorship.