Over the past years there has been a greater demand for online censorship and surveillance, as an understandable reaction against hate speech, copyright violations, and other cases related to citizen compliance with civil laws and regulations by national authorities. Unfortunately, this is often accompanied by a tendency of extensively censoring online content and massively spying on citizens actions. Numerous whistleblower revelations, leaks from classified documents, and a vast amount of information released by activists, researchers and journalists, reveal evidence of government-sponsored infrastructure that either goes beyond the requirements and scope of the law, or operates without any effective regulations in place. In addition, this infrastructure often supports the interests of big private corporations, such as the companies that enforce online copyright control.
TICS lies within the study area of Internet censorship, surveillance and other adversarial burdens to technology that bring in danger; to a greater extend the safety (physical security and privacy) of its users. Proposals for TICS should be situated within the field of Internet censorship, network measurements, information controls, surveillance and content moderation. Ideally topics should connect to the following, but not limited to:
- Technical, social, political, and economical implications of Internet censorship and surveillance
- Detection and analysis of network blocking and surveillance infrastructure (hardware or software)
- Research on legal frameworks, regulations and policies that imply blocking or limitation of the availability of network services and online content
- Online censorship circumvention and anti-surveillance practices
- Network measurements methodologies to detect and categorize network interference
- Research on the implications of automated or centralized user content regulation (such as for hate speech, copyright, or disinformation)
We are interested in exploring the different sociotechnical aspects of Internet Censorship and Surveillance, hence, we look forward to academic conferences with different orientations willing to add TICS as a special track within them.
Please contact us at tics@101.cy for any collaboration
suggestion, or for any questions regarding the nature of our work.