Tor and Censorship: lessons learned

Roger recently gave a talk at 26C3 about our experiences with various censorship technologies.

In the aftermath of the Iranian elections in June, and then the late September blockings in China, we've learned a lot about how circumvention tools work in reality for activists in tough situations. I'll give an overview of the Tor architecture, and summarize the variety of people who use it and what security it provides. Then we'll focus on the use of tools like Tor in countries like Iran and China: why anonymity is important for circumvention, why transparency in design and operation is critical for trust, the role of popular media in helping – and harming – the effectiveness of the tools, and tradeoffs between usability and security. After describing Tor's strategy for secure circumvention (what we thought would work), I'll talk about how the arms race actually seems to be going in practice.

The slides of the presentation can be found at the bottom of this post.

We've mirrored the full 700MB video of the presentation at http://media.torproject.org/video/26c3-3554-de-tor_and_censorship_lesso…