Here is an early brainstorming list of the scope for our future anti-censorship team. Let us know if we left out a critical category. And of course once we have actual team members I expect they will take this initial roadmap and do something even smarter than this list. :)
(1) BridgeDB: - Automated monitoring - Understand current usage patterns, consider improving the design Don't get obfs4 bridges blocked by other transports (#28655)
(2) Pluggable Transports: - Improve the PT interface with Tor, to pass logs etc (#25502) [with network team] - Tor Browser can use other circumvention tools as proxies (#28556) [with browser team] - Specific PTs: Maintain obfs4proxy (like fixing the iat bug that let Kazakhstan block it) Snowflake Httpsproxy Marionette Domain front through community sites - Talk to research groups to keep in touch about their PT research work
(3) Improve Tor user experience for users in censored / crappy networks: - Gettor: automated monitoring and automated updates. Improve UX. - Understanding and reducing client time to bootstrap [with network team] and other parameters that are tuned poorly for slow networks
(4) Understand Tor censorship: - Tor Browser network testing mode (#23839, #28531) [with browser team] - Reachability scanning for the default (shipped in Tor Browser) bridges [with ooni] - Understand bridge load and bridge blocking (e.g. fix user counting bugs that are making our Turkey count wrong) [with network / metrics teams]
(5) Help users use bridges: - Help NGOs get their users on bridges (#28015, #28526) - Tor Browser *automates* picking the right PTs [with browser team]
(6) Community outreach and integration: [with community team] - [Initial list of outreach partner NGOs elided for now, since some of them have opsec needs to keep their people safe]