Fellow
Information Controls Fellow
Ram’s OTF Fellowship at the Citizen Lab aims to develop a set of techniques and fingerprints to identify devices performing censorship, and measure their deployment in different countries.
In recent years, censorship and surveillance events have occurred at unprecedented scale, enabled by the proliferation of censorship devices with the ability to inspect large amounts of network traffic and enact fine-grained interference. While censorship technologies have advanced, techniques to identify and monitor them are still limited, and are developed on a case-by-case basis. Ram’s previous work in this space developed techniques to scalably identify responses from these devices in Censored Planet and OONI data. During his fellowship, Ram will work on developing a toolkit that identifies devices scalable through passive and active measurement techniques. The project will generate a public fingerprint database that can be used to identify censorship devices, and Ram will use the fingerprints to study the deployment of these devices in different countries.