FOCI 2015 - 5th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet

The 5th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '15), to be held on August 10, 2015, seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners working on means to study, detect, or circumvent practices that inhibit free and open communication on the Internet.
Internet communications drive political and social change around the world. Governments and other actors seek to control, monitor, manipulate and block Internet communications for a variety of reasons, ranging from extending copyright law to suppressing free speech and assembly. Methods for controlling what content people post and view online are also multifarious. Whether it's traffic throttling by ISPs or man-in-the-middle attacks by countries seeking to identify those organizing protests, threats to free and open communications on the Internet raise a wide range of research challenges.
FOCI '15 invites submissions from technical as well as policy and social science-oriented research. Work that combines perspectives from multiple fields is especially encouraged.
We encourage submission of new, interesting work on a wide variety of topics of interest, including but not limited to the following areas:
Network Interference and Internet Censorship
Capabilities and constraints of Internet filtering technologies
Techniques for measuring the prevalence and operation of deployed national-level Internet censorship systems
Studies and findings on real-world censorship or tampering from field deployments or other methods, such as the topics or content censored by states or the extent to which ISPs are degrading certain types of content or service
Comparisons of existing tools that might be used to detect tampering, blocking, or violations of net neutrality
Metrics and benchmarks for content tampering or performance degradation
Detection, measuring, and analysis of the censorship of search results
Ethical and legal issues surrounding measurements of network interference and Internet censorship
Surveillance
Analysis of passive or targeted surveillance systems
Techniques to counter passive or targeted surveillance or its effects
Circumvention
Evaluation or analysis of existing anti-censorship systems
Design of network protocols and topologies that resist tampering or blocking
Capabilities of deep packet inspection (DPI) and robust mechanisms to circumvent DPI
Usability in censorship-resistant systems
Policy
Effects of information control on individuals, society, business, or political processes
Analysis of policy processes behind censorship / surveillance regimes
Analysis of the economic impact of censorship
The role of private corporations in spreading or enabling surveillance / censorship
FOCI favors interesting and new ideas and early results. We envision that work presented at FOCI will ultimately lead to more mature publications at relevant, high-quality conferences. Papers will be selected primarily based on originality, significance, and technical merit, with additional consideration given to their potential to foster productive discussion at the workshop.