FOCI 2012 - 2nd USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet

The 2nd USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '12) seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners from technology, law, and policy who are working on means to study, detect, or circumvent practices that inhibit free and open communications on the Internet.
The Internet offers great promise for improving the communication capabilities of citizens, but our increasing dependence on networked communications also makes it easier for organizations to control, monitor, and block communications. ISPs and governments routinely restrict access to Internet content and services, either by censoring access to information or by degrading the performance of services or blocking them entirely. Similarly, ISPs can degrade network performance for certain sets of users for some or all services, for arbitrary purposes. ISPs have been found to block or throttle certain application traffic routinely. This growing trend toward blocking, tampering, or otherwise restricting communications on the Internet calls for improved techniques both for monitoring the state of restrictions on Internet content and communications, in order to inform users, and for circumventing attempts to censor, degrade, or otherwise tamper with Internet communications.
The broadening scope of attacks on Internet freedom is forcing more disciplines to address the issue. Last year's workshop brought together four research communities:
Those studying network neutrality and performance degradation
Those measuring content censorship and blocking of resources and services
Those designing and evaluating censorship circumvention tools
Those who work on the wider implications of censorship, bringing perspectives from the worlds of policy, law, ethics, and political and social sciences
This second workshop aims to repeat and promote this critical interdisciplinary approach.
Topics
We encourage submission of new, interesting work on a wide variety of topics of interest, including but not limited to the following areas:
Evaluation or analysis of existing anti-censorship systems
Comparisons of existing performance-measurement tools that might be used to detect tampering, blocking, or violations of net neutrality
Studies and findings on real-world censorship or tampering from field deployments or other methods, such as the content that states censor or the extent to which ISPs are degrading certain types of content or service
Metrics and analysis of plausible deniability and robustness
Metrics and benchmarks for content tampering or performance degradation
Detection, measuring, and analysis of the censorship of search results
Design of network protocols and topologies that resist tampering or censorship
Techniques to counter mass surveillance or its effects
The role of private corporations in spreading or enabling surveillance and censorship
Capabilities of deep packet inspection (DPI) and robust mechanisms to circumvent DPI
Legality of censorship-resistant systems or bypassing censorship
Economic considerations in the design and deployment of censorship-resistant systems
Analysis of the economic impact of censorship
Usability in censorship-resistant systems
Effects of censorship on society, business, or political processes