Real-Time Monitoring of
ISP Censorship Systems.

Probes, data, and the people behind them

The probe network collects DNS behaviour from individual connections to detect injected addresses, DNS hijacks and misdirected responses. Geo-localisation sources are credited, with periodic updates recorded in the project archive. Probes can be activated for a specific country or ISP to expand coverage.

Net neutrality monitoring offers a way to observe how internet service providers shape the connections that reach our devices. By examining the path that requests take, researchers can detect when content is silently rerouted, blocked, or interfered with. The goal is not to accuse but to illuminate, turning invisible technical decisions into measurable evidence that the public can review and discuss openly.

At the heart of any monitoring effort lies the humble DNS query, the lookup that translates a readable address into a numeric destination. When an internet service provider intercepts these queries, users may be sent to unexpected servers or filtered pages without ever realising it. Capturing these responses and comparing them against expected results is one of the most reliable methods for identifying tampering at the network level.

Probes distributed across many regions provide a fuller picture than any single connection ever could. Each probe reports back about the addresses it resolves, the servers it contacts, and any anomalies it encounters. When many probes in different locations point to the same behaviour, patterns emerge that can indicate intentional filtering rather than isolated technical failure, giving analysts confidence in their findings.

Internet censorship takes many forms, from outright blocking of certain services to more subtle shaping of traffic that throttles particular applications. Different countries adopt different approaches, and those approaches can shift quickly in response to political events or public pressure. Continuous monitoring makes it possible to track these changes over time, distinguishing temporary disruptions from lasting policy decisions enforced by providers.

Transparency is the foundation upon which trust between users and providers must be built. When operators openly publish how their networks handle different categories of traffic, customers can make informed choices about the services they purchase. Independent measurement projects complement this transparency by offering an outside view, ensuring that published claims can be checked against observed reality in the field.

Data without context risks becoming noise, so thoughtful analysis matters as much as raw collection. Researchers sort detected anomalies by country, by provider, and by the type of resource affected, building reports that are both readable and reproducible. This combination of structured data and human interpretation helps journalists, advocates, and curious readers understand what the numbers actually mean for everyday browsing.

Volunteers play a crucial role in expanding the reach of any monitoring network. By running a small probe on a home connection, ordinary citizens contribute observations that would otherwise be missing from the dataset. This distributed model reduces blind spots, particularly in regions where commercial measurement infrastructure is sparse, and turns the act of watching the network into a shared civic responsibility.

Privacy considerations shape every stage of a responsible monitoring project. Probe operators must be careful not to record personal browsing habits while still capturing enough signal to detect interference. Aggregating data, anonymising identifiers, and publishing only summarised results help balance the public benefit of transparency with the private right of individuals to use the internet without surveillance.

Real-time reporting transforms a static archive into a living portrait of the network. Daily updates allow readers to see whether a newly reported block is still active, whether a previously blocked site has become reachable, or whether new patterns of interference are beginning to appear. Over time, these snapshots accumulate into a valuable historical record of how the open internet is shaped, contested, and preserved.