Manzar: issues with cyber censorship in India

Abstract

Last semester we found that the Indian government delegates censorship policies at ISP level which is inconsistent and disorganized. We filed multiple RTIs to Department of Telecommunication seeking censorship policies of Indian government but did not get a clear response. Then we tested various ISP and found evidences of same kind of censorship happening. This semester we tested how censorship is happening across various ISPs and found the mechanism to be same across ISPs, even the blocking message was same across multiple ISPs which leads to two possibilities, i.e. either every ISP is using the same tool or censorship is happening only at the ISPs who are at the top of the hierarchy e.g. Airtel. Present state of art tools like OONI [1] does not tries to either maintain a list of blocked websites or try to circumvent it. Furthermore, it does not have the functionality to locate middle-boxes which are doing it. We fixed all of the above shortcomings of OONI. We created our own set of tests for censorship to determine type of censorship and locate middle boxes. We designed a tool to circumvent the censorship happening in India. We are also working on a platform i.e. a web app and a chrome extension to collect result of our tests in a central repository to further aid future studies in this domain.