SaTC: CORE: Small: Proactive Approaches to Defeat Internet Suppression

Internet suppression continues to be a significant global threat to freedom of speech and open access to information for average citizens in many countries or regions. While there exists an arsenal of tools to defeat Internet suppression, they often fall short of helping users effectively and reliably. This project is based on the key observation that existing technologies are largely reactive to the Internet suppressions: they only adjust their counter mechanisms based on the actions taken by the suppressors. The project team believes that in order to defeat Internet suppression, novel and more proactive approaches are required. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is to investigate, design, analysis, and deploy proactive techniques to fight against Internet suppression, with the objective of making these new techniques more dynamic and adaptive. This project will pursue three complementary thrusts on creating proactive techniques to defeat Internet suppression. First, the project aims to build a generic, extensible Internet suppression emulation framework capable of emulating past, present, and future suppression strategies to help researcher to gain insights into the problem. The project aims for such an emulation framework to become an integral part of future research and development on proactive anti-suppression techniques. Second, the project plans to explore the extent of capabilities that AI may be exploited to assist Internet suppression and then develop effective countermeasures. Finally, the project plans to facilitate the adoption of the created anti-suppression techniques through Internet-scale testing and bring them out to practitioners and users. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.