10 years of Internet Freedom: my experience measuring and circumventing Internet Censorship
Simone Basso, Researcher and Developer
Internet freedom is the collective term used to describe organizations working to measure and overcome internet censorship. These organizations began to gain prominence around the time of the Arab Spring in 2011, when governments such as Egypt’s completely shut down internet access in response to public protests. That moment drew attention to increasingly sophisticated forms of censorship — techniques that are now potentially available even to Western governments. In this talk, I’ll draw on my ten years of experience (2014–2024) to offer a technical and methodological perspective on the phenomenon. I’ll introduce the main open-source projects in the field, showing concrete examples of how we measure censorship and how citizens can bypass it. I’ll focus on how censorship techniques have evolved across different contexts, examining how control methods have become more refined over time, and discussing specific cases from various countries — including some in Europe.