Cellular data restrictions imposed from Mar. 15, 2021 were invisible to IODA (which uses BGP routing data, active probing, and darknet traffic) because cellular networks commonly use Carrier Grade NAT. Kentik's AS-level NetFlow aggregates clearly showed the cellular traffic drop, with all four major cellular ASes (MPT AS9988, Mytel AS136255, Telenor AS133385, Ooredoo AS132167) experiencing sustained traffic reductions while fixed-line providers only showed nightly dips.

Beginning Feb. 14, 2021, country-wide Internet outages affected Myanmar for 72 consecutive nights until Apr. 28, starting at 18:30 UTC (01:00 local time) and lasting 8 hours each night. These nightly curfews were highly synchronized across most ISPs—identical start and end times—in stark contrast to the haphazard, mis-timed outages on the day of the coup.

§3.2 deployment

IP blocking in Myanmar was non-deterministic within individual ASes: Frontiir (AS58952) blocked Facebook's IP 157.240.15.36 but not 31.13.82.36, indicating ISPs used incomplete address lists. Different websites were blocked on different networks, and DNS interference was inconsistent even within a single ISP's resolvers, confirming that censorship was decentralized rather than implemented via a national choke point.

§3.3 detection

Post-coup, Myanmar ISPs shifted from primarily DNS-based blocking (dominant in 2020) to IP-based blocking. Blocking Fastly's IP 151.101.1.195 triggered collateral unavailability of more than 10,000 co-hosted websites; blocking a Google-hosted IP (172.217.194.121) rendered snapchat.com, getoutline.org, and others unreachable on at least 4 ASes during Feb. 24–27, 2021.

§3.3 evaluation

On Feb. 5, 2021, Campana Mythic (AS136168) announced Twitter's 104.244.42.0/24 prefix—apparently intending to blackhole Twitter traffic locally as part of the national Twitter block—but the route leaked to operators in Singapore and Vietnam, causing collateral disruption for Twitter users outside Myanmar. This accidental BGP leak corroborates evidence that Myanmar ISPs were independently implementing IP-level censorship without a centralized national kill switch.

§3.4 deployment

'Resource Inaccessible' was the most frequently reported issue (61% of 119 submitted reports) during a month of naturalistic Tor Browser browsing, followed by CAPTCHAs (18%), Broken Content (17%), Other Issues (13%), and Timeouts (5%). These categories document the operational failure modes that degrade everyday Tor Browser usability beyond protocol-level censorship.

2026-micallef-reportor-facilitating-user §6.1, Figure 3 ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

The privacy properties of Tor Browser structurally preclude automated telemetry collection, creating a persistent blind spot for diagnosing user experience failures at scale. ReporTor demonstrates that anonymous voluntary in-situ reporting — transmitted over the Tor network and stored in a password-protected onion-service database — can substitute for telemetry: 119 reports over one month from five expert users sufficed to reproduce approximately half of reported issues exactly and identify root causes for most of the remainder.

2026-micallef-reportor-facilitating-user §1, §7.1 measurement-platform

The largest single source of censored domains in the GNL is MESA lab's SNI monitoring dataset (E21-SNI-Top200w.txt) containing 57,362 censored domains, and E21-SNI-Top120W-20221020.txt with 36,467 domains—totaling over 93K domains from network tap data alone for a single country (E21 = Ethiopia per InterSecLab attribution). A separate Xinjiang dataset (XJ-CUCC-SNI-Top200w.txt) contains 13,604 domains. These datasets "do not seem to come from popular domain lists, and instead appear to be gathered from network taps," confirming that Geedge builds censorship target lists directly from passive traffic observation.

2026-sheffey-geedge §4.2, Table 3 dpisni-blockingmeasurement-platform

Of 6,915,266 domains extracted from the 572 GiB Geedge Networks Leak (GNL), 298,955 censored domains (93.7% of all GNL-censored domains) appear in neither Tranco top-1M nor CitizenLab test lists. Measurements across China (Guangzhou/Nanjing), Myanmar, Pakistan, and Algeria confirmed censorship via DNS injection and SNI-based TLS connection termination. The GNL covers 25–62% of Tranco-censored domains across countries, showing substantial but incomplete overlap. This vendor-side ground truth reveals a censorship surface roughly two orders of magnitude larger than curated academic test lists.

2026-sheffey-geedge §4.1, Table 2 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningmeasurement-platform

CensorAlert aggregates censorship signals from heterogeneous open sources — including OONI, Cloudflare Radar, NetBlocks, GitHub Issues of circumvention tools (Hysteria, Xray), Net4People BBS, NTC Party forum, Mastodon, X, Telegram channels, and arXiv — normalizing each item into a common schema preserving timestamp, source, raw data, and provenance with a link to the original content.

2026-zohaib-extended §2 (Data Sources) measurement-platform

Systematic measurement platforms (OONI, Censored Planet, Cloudflare Radar, NetBlocks) have inherent blind spots due to geographic coverage and protocol-specific test constraints; critical censorship discoveries — including GFW fully-encrypted protocol blocking and regional Chinese censorship — were first surfaced by user reports on forums and GitHub issue pages of circumvention tools, not by automated measurement infrastructure.

2026-zohaib-extended §1 measurement-platformfully-encrypted-detect