On August 8, 2011, the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies Visiting Research Fellow in International Broadcasting Karl Kathuria and a team from the Citizen Lab presented a paper titled Bypassing Internet Censorship for News Broadcasters at the first USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’11) in San Francisco, California. The paper is concerned with Internet censorship as a major problem faced by news organizations.
It looks at two technical considerations for the BBC, based on its distribution of non-English content into countries such as Iran and China where the news services are permanently unavailable from the official BBC websites: blocking detection and circumvention. It examines an internal BBC prototype system built in 2010 to detect online censorship of its content, and evaluates potential improvements. It also reviews the BBC’s use of circumvention tools, and considers the impact and execution of pilot services for Iran and China. Finally, the study considers the technical delivery of the BBC’s news output and the methods it employs to bypass Internet censorship.
For full paper, see here [pdf].