[liberationtech] Tor blog post on circumvention

[Hal Roberts]

FYI, I think the paragraph below is referencing our circumvention usage 
report.  We didn't survey people about whether they knew about proxies 
in that report.  We just tried to figure out how many people are using 
tools by looking at traffic reports for the tools (through a combination 
of public web traffic reports and self reports from tool providers).  We 
found that at most about 3% of filtered Internet users use a 
circumvention tool in a given month.

We didn't try to say anything about how many people know about the 
tools.  It's possible that folks in filtered countries know proxies 
exist and just choose not to use them for a variety of reasons, 
including that they don't need to access blocked content.  In fact, we 
have some evidence from a just fielded survey of international bloggers 
(hoping to release the data and analysis soon!) that this is the case 
for a significant number of people (or at least of our sample of bloggers).

-hal

On 2/13/11 1:18 PM, RMacK wrote:
>
>       Sent to you by RMacK via Google Reader:
>
>
>     five minutes to speak
>     <https://blog.torproject.org/blog/five-minutes-speak>
>
> via The Tor Blog blogs <https://blog.torproject.org/blog> by phobos on
> 2/13/11
>
[ snip ]

>     Roughly 1 billion people are online in some way. Berkman did a study
>     that found roughly 2% of that billion know what a proxy is, or even that
>     technology exists to circumvent internet censorship. 98% of the world
>     accepts that facebook, google, cnn, and the bbc, are blocked and doesn't
>     try to find ways around it. This doesn't even broach the topic of online
>     privacy relating to commercial entities nor law enforcement and
>     intelligence agencies trying to learn the who, what, where, and how
>     of your Internet activities.