Internet Censorship in Venezuela with Andres Azpurua

Widespread government censorship is still happening in many parts of the world, and that includes censoring activity and content on the Internet. And that's very much the case in Venezuela where there was a recent presidential election just this past summer, which only exasperated the issue. So with us today to talk about government Internet censorship in Venezuela is Andres Azpurua, the executive director of an Internet freedom and advocacy group in Venezuela very much focused on using data to hold those who would impede the freedom of information accountable.

My name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry Now.

Andres, thank you so much for joining today. It really is a pleasure to have you on in doing the preparation for today's show. I I really found it intriguing, the topic, the content of what we're gonna be discussing today, especially in light of the recent elections just last month in, in Venezuela. So thank you, and and Doug, of course, for for coming on again as a as a an honored guest and cohost, from time to time.

Really is a pleasure to have you as well. Now you two both have a history together. But before we get into that, Andre, can you Andres, excuse me. Can you give us a little bit of a background about yourself and what you do?

Sure. So I'm executive director of Conexión Segura y Libre, which we translate as free and secure online. It's a human rights or a digital human rights NGO.

We we document, with a technical perspective, with a technical, eye, through digital threats against human rights. And we also develop and facilitate, civic technology, and we, help train and respond to detail security incidents that Venezuelan civil society and independent journalists might have, with a varied set of threat actors who sometimes include, state actor.

And your focus is entirely within the country of Venezuela of course, is that right?

Not not entirely. It's our main it's our it's our main focus. We have trained folks from different NGOs and different countries on some of the stuff we do. So, like, documenting Internet censorship with with, again, like, everything from standardized tools that our community uses, but also, like, how to analyze package captures Mhmm. And try to understand what's going on with the censorship and stuff like that and how to articulate that technical data or those measurements into advocacy.

I see. And and so, what your organization does is certainly intertwine with the, the ongoings on a political scale on, you know, the actual country of Venezuela.

But from what you just said, you you really come at it from a very technical perspective. Of course, intermeshed very much with, how that the the technical components of how the Internet operates, how that interplays with, you know, society at large. But it is from a very technical perspective, it sounds like.

Yeah. Indeed. We're we're the very uncommon human rights NGO that has more engineers than any other profession in Okay. The team.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, Doug, how, how have you and Andre now Andre's just mentioned Internet measurement, which is your, your area of expertise. So may I ask how how the two of you, got to know each other?

Well, I mean, this is our first time speaking. We've been trading messages on and off. I don't know. For many years, one of us will like, there's a there's a whole community of people in the digital right space who, in the behind the scenes, send messages to each other, like, hey. Do you have data on this? I do or I don't, or go over to this person, this other organization.

So, in the course of that kind of work, I think we've, we've traded messages. But, this is our first time, speaking, and, and I didn't mention it, but Andres is call is calling us from, Caracas, Venezuela.

And I think, you know, our for our podcast, our audience is typically engine engineers, network engineers. We have a technical, audience, but I but they aren't necessarily, international affairs majors. So, Andres, would you would you maybe just briefly describe, the the current political situation in Andres in in Venezuela, excuse me.

And, and then, you know, then maybe we can relate that to how does that, reflect or or affect digital rights.

Sure. So so exactly one month ago, we had a presidential election in Venezuela.

There are sorts of which, have been, let's say, criticized by all manner of audiences. It's they're they're not believable results.

The results have been put into question by the position, by the Venezuelan civil society, the Venezuelan public at large.

Not absolutely everyone, of course, but, it's very widely considered to be, not the real results. So this has been the position of, many governments throughout the world from everything from left leaning governments such as, Brazil's Lula da Silva or Colombia's Petro all the way to the US or the EU.

The the panel of experts from the from the from the from the UN, doesn't believe the results in a very strongly worded message for whatever is the standard in at the at the UN. It was it was it was, unusually straightforward for a UN text. And similarly, the the the Carter Center, which also had people in the country at the time, said that this didn't comply with any of the minimum standards for transparency, or, like, any democratic election. Since then, it's been a lot of repression and intercensorship and persecution, frequently used, in conjunction with technology.

So a lot of surveillance technology being in place, using technology to identify protesters and to create a lot of fear. So a lot of, social media messages coming from the state, trying to create fear so people wouldn't speak out on social media or on the streets even if even if peacefully peacefully. So, there's a lot going on and there's been a lot of censorship during the election campaign. We saw a dramatic increase of Internet censorship and since then, even more.

So the election that took place one month ago, but you've been at you've been at this work for a long time. Yes. And this situation this is just the latest, but the situation has been going, you know, for a long time. So how how long has your organization existed? How long have you been doing this?

So so I would I have to say that it's hard it's hard for me to say exactly when the organization started since we since we started with an with an actual, like, funding document.

But many years ago. Since some many years ago.

But yeah. Over ten years ago for sure. And our our investing fee through the the the our project that documents those digital threats against human rights, particularly internet censorship, has has more than ten years. I want I I recently had to go to like, when did I register this domain? I was like, oh, over ten years ago. So so so that's so that output that. At least ten years ago, we started doing all of this.

So in your, and in on, like, the Vasea Philip, like, Twitter handle or x handle, like, you you are often using, like, the IOTA data to, highlight outages.

So there's seems like in your work and, occasionally, I do something to analyze, Venezuela. I see, like, the the variety of things that take place are there's a lot of outages due to, you know, power outages or just old infrastructure, just things breaking, maybe more than they would in another country.

There's also, as you described a minute ago, some of the politically motivated, either, you know, disabling service in a in a particular part of the country or blocking a a a website or social media service. I also recall at one point, maybe this still takes place of of blocking websites that report on the black market exchange rates, for, currency, which is, I think maybe, something we don't typically think about when we think about dealer rights leasing in United States, but that, is a another big issue in, in in Venezuela.

Yes. Indeed.

For for a long time, like, the main category of websites that got blocked was indeed, was it that powers the black market exchange rate for US dollars to to Venezuela.

But with time, like, the the most sensitive category or the most, important focus, for the for the censorship, moved around for different different things. But as as the focus of Internet censorship moved, with what's the most sensitive topic for the government, so that's when the prevalent censorship the most prevalent censorship, moved. Right now, I would say that for sure the most, pervasive Internet censorship applies to, news media. So we have, over sixty news websites blocked. If we if we look at it via, like, how many domains, the list would be much larger because multiple websites have multiple domains in order to circumvent that censorship.

But, at least as not at least, more than sixty percent, more than sixty, news websites are blocked in Venezuela, including most of the Venezuelan independent, news ecosystem. So it's really, really hard to get any form of independent news in Venezuela, by just browsing the web.

Any websites you can think will likely get blocked. If you see tweets with links to to a news article, if you click on those links, it would likely not load for you. If your family or your WhatsApp group is sharing something about an important news article and you click on it, it won't open most likely because of dating censorship.

We have also had, in our shutdowns, and we have also seen, moments in which, social media is, like, the most important thing to block. In twenty nineteen, we recorded many, many cases, where the we had Internet censorship against WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Periscope at the time, Instagram, anything where people could do some live streaming because the live streaming was the most sensitive thing at the time, in order to prevent folks to getting used in real time.

So so they would things had moved, diff different techniques, have been implemented. For example, those block that those blocks against social media and streaming platforms mostly happened, and were as short as possible. So they didn't implement it to be a DNS blocking, which is the most common type of censorship that we see here and most of around the world, I would say.

But we use use different types of intern of intern censorship in order to be, like, more precise. I'm, like, I want the block to start right now. I don't want the block to end at this moment specifically to make it as short as possible to, I assume, limit the political and reputational cost of that censorship. But at the same time, make make sure that the live event was, not shared live. So we have many types of things going on.

Andres, on the on the DNS, blocking or tampering, is it, are they are the queries intercepted, or or or do they just, have, like, the major ISPs, put in a bad record for, DNS? Like, if you were if you were a user and you went to, like, eight dot eight dot eight dot switch your DNS, would you be able to get around it, or or are they intercepting the queries so you wouldn't be able to get around it?

So for the most part, it's just, the ISPs, their own DNS servers have bad records. So do they get a x record or or you get an empty reply or something to get a local host, like, one one one two seven dot o dot o dot one, responses. You get a just a loopback address, as as as the as their a record for a domain, which won't work for sure.

And, depending on the ISP, but some ISPs, do block, like, access to the actual, like, public DNS. So so we have some public DNS servers who are who are blocked. And we have also seen some, DNS, package, dropping, but it's not it's not very prevalent. And we also seen some, DNS package injection in which, the ISP through their, through their middle boxes would inject responses pertaining to be, let's say, Google's public DNS or, quad one or quad nine or whatever.

So, so you get like, if you do package capture in those incidents, you will get two responses. But the first one you get is the fake forged response, and that's the one that computer uses. And, and then you get either the wrong response that will not lead you to the website you that you wanted or more likely what you get is a phishing website. And this has been, used by by the by the state owned telecoms to create massive massive phishing campaigns against dissidents.

Because then when people try even if they typed the correct URL, they will get to the wrong website. And if they hadn't had HTTPS turned on, they just didn't notice.

And if they did have HTTPS turned on, this get a browser warning that people have been, for different reasons, been already, like, trained to ignore. This is also, like, one of those things about how, even if there are some features in the browsers, if people are just accustomed to ignoring those browser warnings for for different unrelated reasons, then, then people will not pay attention to those when when it actually matters, and they are actually protecting you from a phishing website.

So in in Venezuela, like, you you mentioned, like, the the getting a a bad query bad, you know, query response will beat the good query in your computer. That's how, you know, the I don't know that it does this anymore with the great firewall at one point, like, ten years ago or so. It used to do that. In fact, you could be sit outside, the the China.

You can go from the United States and send in these queries and you get their responses back. They've they've they've since locked that up. But, there's no great firewall of Venezuela to my knowledge. So the the government gives an order and each ISP has to implement this separately.

Is that correct?

Yeah. That that is correct. HSP has their own tools. Some use just DNS censorships. Some some have native browsers.

It creates some variability. Does does that create some variability between, you know, what provider you're using to connect, and what censorship you may experience?

Yes. For sure. And and in some cases, you'll be able to use circumvented by changing your DNS.

And in some cases, you you you won't have that that as an option. Or or this won't work for for most websites.

Is there DPI, like deep packet inspection, stuff going on? Or yeah.

Yeah. So so so so so so you see a lot of, HTTP host and HTTPS, like, the TLS, handshake being monitored. So either the HTTP HTTP host, of an HTTP request or the SNI for, for a TLS handshake, are being looked at by by censorship equipment. And then you get some like, your connection may be reset or your package dropped, depending on, like, on the HTTP host or the SNI.

So you you see both kinds of filtering, even as sort of networks at the moment. But you also see just DNS, and it's very common to see also, different blocking techniques being used in tandem on the same ISP. So you you it's very common to find, DNS censorship and SNI filtering and, HTTP host blocking. So HTTP HTTPS censorship and DNS censorship, or you might have seen, like, I don't know, some things have blocked via IP blocking, alright, and some things which could be as simple as a routing table just set to something that doesn't work.

And, and at the same time, other types of censorship in tandem.

Does, so I know a little about the the the telecom landscape in Venezuela. So you've got Cantere is the, incumbent. Is that what most people use, to connect, or is are they using some of the, other competing mobile providers?

Yeah. So is the largest. So a s eight zero four eight. If you're you're looking for it.

I knew that. I knew that. You could you could have test me. I could've I would've known that.

So so is the is the largest, residential ISP, by far.

It used to be even larger, but it's been we've seen a significant increase since, like, I don't know, year one of the pandemic when the Venezuelan Internet suffered tremendously because it's it's not well set up for folks just going to their homes and then trying to use the the Internet from home.

Where you suffer, there's been a lot of, like, opening of the market for for either less traditional ISPs or at least traditional ISPs to start offering, fiber, fiber to the home in much larger numbers. It's and there's still a tremendous gap. Venezuela had, like, many, many years of underinvestment in their telecom infrastructure, and you that's how you see it in, like, all of the outages that you see. And there's, like, a huge chunk of, clients that are still on copper wires.

And, and and and some of those, they haven't had Internet for years. Not I mean, not not not weeks or days. I mean, we're talking about years without Internet service because the infrastructure is just broken at so many points that they just decided to not not continue working on it and just wait until eventually fiber gets to your house. And they're not, like, changing cables that are, like, corroded or changing, d n, DSL equipment at different nodes because they they just decided not to not to care much about investing in in upkeeping those that that copper network anymore.

And that also happens with some private ISPs that they they had decided to just let it that their, their coaxial network to their, HFC network to just die because they, they're just investing everything on on on fiber optic and and and let their old network die. And customers who just lose access to the network, they just, oh, you have to wait until we get to you with fiber optic. At a price point that most Venezuelans can't afford, it's like a like a like a like an order of magnitude of a different price point. So most most Venezuelan users can't afford that, like, the new fiber optic services.

But definitely continues to be the the largest by far, residential ISPs both, like, with a with a with a DSL and the fiber optic, offering.

Just But doesn't they don't do mobile content of it?

They have a subsidiary with a different AS Okay.

That that that provides mobile Internet. It's one of the only three mobile operators in the country. It's the smallest one of the three. Again, because it's much easier to just change mobile operators. And when the lack of investment, start to show, really bad on that ISP, people on that mobile operator that decided to to change to a private offering.

But it continues to be a significant amount of users. It's just the smallest of the of the three.

Does your organization catalog and record each of these types of disruptions and, you know, either, you know, something breaking due to old infrastructure or something getting blocked? Is that is that one of the objectives or some of the work products of We try.

Okay. We definitely try. We we we we we not we not always we can.

And so for example, last night when I mean, many Venezuelan states lost power for a few minutes, Like, fifteen, thirty minutes, maybe up to an hour.

At some points, we're not one hundred percent sure of the time. It was it was late at night. And when we did report it, mostly based on on IOTA, data. And, and we will do, like, very that was a very clear case of the network outage and then drop in connectivity measured as the number of up, slash twenty four, network segments that were visible from from the Internet.

You you could see, how it affected multiple states, and it's pretty obvious that it was just our outages. Sometimes we have to look like, was just one ISP who dropped?

Is are there any reports of upstream providers having difficulties? Are there any public reports kind of thing? Like, maybe we can get this social, and ask folks, like, hey. Is, like, is there a power outage in such state?

Or, do you have any reason why I I we're seeing a drop in this network? And then we can, like, come to a conclusion on on what's the what's the reason for the for the outage. Sometimes it's very obvious. Sometimes, we we need to ask for folks.

Maybe some folks have, like, some other information that is not, not as public. And, eventually, sometimes we just don't know, and we just report it as unknown.

I know a number of years ago, maybe maybe you and I talked about this. I remember reporters from Venezuela reaching out because there was a, there was another countrywide, Internet problem, and, and the government was saying it was a submarine cable, outage in the Caribbean.

I went and looked into it, and I did find evidence. It seemed like it hit Venezuela harder than other countries.

But what I found was everybody was so, you know, used to, combating lies from the government that it was very hard to convince anybody there actually was a submarine cable problem. I think in that case, it's possible they were telling the truth, and everyone's already preprogrammed to, assume it's a lie. You mentioned IOTA, and, I think I mentioned as well. So for anyone listening, this is the, Internet outage detection and analysis, service put together by Georgia Tech, our friends over there. It is a free there's, like, a web page. It's very API accessible.

I use it. Andres uses it. I think a lot of people in the digital right space rely on this, and what it does is, for either for each AS, each country, it'll track, like, the BGP routes that are up. It has some active measurements and ping stuff going on. There's a few other metrics that they pull in from, like, Google and, you know, there's other projects, but it's a it's a handy way to just, for free, just go check, see if a problem if there's problems in a particular country or a a network.

And, I know I think we both make a lot of use of that. That's a that's a good thing good tool to to know about.

Yeah. It's reasonably good. It has a good interface, especially if, like, if you're not, intimidated by many graphs and then many, like, like, has a or it's a technical tool for folks who are, like, like, I I would put my mom into checking, that website, I would say. But we also consult, consult the the API a lot. So so it's useful that the API access that it provides is very useful because then you can, like, make your own graphs and make your own, like, dashboards if you need, code of that data.

You make use of UNI data as well. So UNI Yes. Is the open, observatory for network interference put on by the tour group.

And, so this is a bit more like a you have, like, a handset, on your on your phone. You've got an app that's running and and testing things, and it provides some technical, analysis on when it can't reach something, how it broke, and that can inform, you know, some idea of how the censorship is taking place. But is that that's something you use as well?

Yeah. We we have we have network probes who who run only, automatically, headless.

So there's rest of your device, basically.

And we have a schedule for for different tests and different measurements on those devices.

And we also use, on handsets, basically, from volunteers, basically. So we coordinate extra measurements, as we need through through volunteers, on their handsets. But we also have this, automated and systematic coverage of test lists on on how hardware probes. And we're hoping to also include, other automatic measurement things. In the past, we have also had a RIPE, RIPE NCC ATLAS probes. Sure.

We currently are not deploying those, but we had in the past. We also I mean, we do use, RIPE Atlas on some measurements, despite not hosting any, Atlas probes at the moment.

How do you how do you make use of the Atlas probes? You're just you're, like, pinging or doing DNS queries and pinging things?

Or We can we can we can do DNS queries.

We can also try to do ping.

There's depending on the type of censorship, you can also detect some like, confirm some things with very specific, HTTPS requests since you can't do HTTPS.

For for what I remember, they what they'll try to do the TLS handshake, but only to their own encore, measuring encores. So it's like a you can't do a TLS request to an arbitrary server.

But since you can do They don't want people DDoS ing, using Exactly.

The right batless proof. Sure. And they're very clear that they're they're preventing abuse. They're they're they're not allowing that to prevent abuse. But since you can indeed, do those TLS handshakes to to specific servers, if you craft that TLS handshake in a very specific way, you can test to see if some of those, attributes are being filtered, for censorship. And we have been doing that occasionally. But mostly, it's like, is this is this like, is it trick like, checking the trace routes from different ASs.

Some like, for example, currently, as we speak, I'm pretty sure last night it was not available, the website for the election authorities in Venezuela. So, like, if we want to test, like, is it accessible on all kinds of networks, then we can just, I don't know, make hundreds of pings or make hundreds of trace routes from different parts of the network just to see, like, from different parts of the world. So, hey. So in most networks in the world, you can't access this website.

Or if you want to compare, I don't know, a DNS DNS, records being put out internationally versus the DNS records that we get locally, for some state websites. So then we can we can we can also do that. Get a couple hundred or fifty, I don't know, DNS records from random probes in the Internet that exclude Venezuela and then make our own measurements from Venezuela. And then we can compare and say, hey. So maybe if some people are claiming that, I don't know, a public state owned website is visible only inside the country, which happens frequently, like, we can we can get some numbers and get some data on that to confirm, if if that's happening and if it's happening, why? And sometimes it's just because of the DNS, that they just like, local networks are answering differently than the DNS resolution outside.

Sure. Andres, you've been speaking a lot about the technical component of how you measure, the activity on the Internet and censorship and, a lot of it being state sponsored censorship.

But I I'd like to understand why you do what you do. I can guess, of course, but I'd like to hear it from you. So, you know, starting with why you and others chose to found the organization, connect Connecion Segura y Libre, but why you came to found it, with with others? And then, of course, what is the current focus of your work? I understand that you're measuring, these these metrics, and you're and you're trying to understand it from a technical spec perspective. But what's the goal?

Sure. So we started working on this, on the organization over a decade ago.

I had been as an like, as I've been an activist for for for for for a while by then by then. Just started with the Venezuelan, student movement in twenty seven, two thousand seven.

I'm older than I look for those who actually see me. And, and and, yeah, I mean, I we were active in protests demanding freedom of speech, especially at a time where, not internet censorship, but censorship of traditional media was was, scaling rapidly, and there are many human rights concerned, even back in the day. And that turned into a more organized form of activism, into, civil society organizations, after working on, on some civil society organizations, that we helped create as a a new cohort, a new generation of of young people, caring about human rights and and civil rights.

But eventually, I I grew to realize that there are many things happening and they're going to start happening even more, that traditional human rights organizations were not equipped to understand.

So even censorship, surveillance, we're talking about, other forms of repression that traditional human rights NGOs didn't have the language, the understanding.

And if they are very capable of if they know how to, I don't know, record evidence and save the evidence and do a advocacy around that. And for traditional human rights violations, like, I don't know, maybe there's video photos of of of police misconduct or something like that. But traditional human rights NGOs were not capable were not really equipped to understand similar or equivalent phenomena that happened, using technology. So so that in addition to the traditional civil society in Venezuela, it's lack of, technical capacity in general.

So even if it's just about, like, let's start using Twitter or let's start using social media. I mean, that communication side of things, they they they they quickly grew. But there are many things that technology can be, an important tool for either bringing activists together or or bringing, citizens together and even facilitating facilitating the the the communication between, local governments and citizens, like civic technology, kind of things. And we realized that there's so many gaps in that space, and we decided to create our organization, which back then was called Venezuela intelligente.

And, and and and make make that space, make that happen, a a space where where we could help facilitate civic technology for, Venezuelan citizens and civil society, but also, provide this, technical perspective to relation to human rights, especially some relation to human rights in Venezuela and to society we're not able to really understand. So, like like, basing imagine amazing, Internet censorship just on people's, I don't know, Twitter complaints that our website is not accessible. Sure. I mean, you can get some info out of that, but you you won't be able to say definitely that, the government is censoring the Internet just because some people couldn't access a website.

There are many reasons why that person couldn't access it. But in our case, we have network measurements that are consistent over time, consistent, with different vantage points. And more than once, we have been, like, we have been criticized, like, no. You guys are lying or you guys are making this up.

Like, hey. Do you have anyone you can trust that it can read, like, p caps? Or you have anyone that you can trust that can, like, analyze this, network measurements. Yeah.

And and you'll come to similar conclusions. And we have more than once, like, especially when we have been documenting more sophisticated threats such as, this, DNS response injection to facilitate a state sponsored phishing attacks on a massive scale. Like, more than once, the people who are, like, with a technical background, is like, I come on. They can't be true.

It's like, well, here are the pickups. Here here are the the audio measurements. Right. Here is here are the the right atlas measurements.

You can just look it on yourself. Here are, like I know you can do DNS history, and you can do like like, you can do redo the same offset that we did to identify which state, offices were participating in in in data attack. And then you'll come to similar or the same conclusions.

And that's also an important part of doing this with a strong technical perspective is to ensure that you're not just claiming things, but you also have the evidence to back it in case Mhmm. People don't leave you, but also in general because it's it's a good practice. We're not just, claiming that there are massive, systematic violations to human rights, on on bikes. We're we are we are claiming that based on evidence.

So then the organization would say that, open and free access to the Internet and ultimately to information that is available on the Internet is, part of the human rights Sure. Movement as well.

For sure. And and we we we we define ourselves as a human rights organization or a digital human rights organization.

And we do many things that human rights organizations do. We provide, reports, with a human rights perspective. We communicate with and engage with other advocacy groups on human rights. We, collaborate and share data with UN agencies, including the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter American, Commission on Human Rights and special, freedom of speech, repertoires or or direct to privacy repertoires because we we see this as human rights violations. We're just documenting it and and contextualizing them with a Tinkle perspective so that we know, like, how big it is. Or, like, when we go through Telefonica's transparency records, we're not just taking them at face value. We're we're contextualizing it, in a way that I would say most traditional human rights in use are not able to really understand it.

And while we also provide, It's okay.

I could see I could see on over your shoulder your poster, digital rights or human rights.

It's kinda captures what you're saying a minute ago of, Yeah.

Exactly. And we also we also see, like, access to, privacy and security preserving techniques and tools is also, a human right, and we facilitate, and try and provide training and incident response to folks who who are on the civic space in Venezuela, who require them, or are under attack. So, like, I don't know. Everything anything you can think about, cybersecurity or digital security that, I don't know, independent your, newsroom might need, we are often, like, with them helping them, so that they have a more secure organization, just like with citizens and activists, which I mean, like like, you can think, like, sure.

Keep your devices up to date. And is it very important to to to make sure you have the latest latest version of your OS and stuff like that. But also, like, how can you hide apps, when you go outside? And you might get stopped by cops, and they might demand to see the contents of your phone.

So how can you hide WhatsApp chats? How can you how can you hide signal from your phone?

Like, how can you create I don't know. Mhmm. Many different things that are not like the traditional, let's say, cybersecurity, thing that you think about, but also more traditional also cybersecurity training. Like, hey, Like, how how how careful are you into not talking to phishing emails, which might or might not be state sponsored or politically motivated. But you you might still, like, be under attack, from those types.

To the extent of this censorship in Venezuela is beyond manipulating DNS responses and and perhaps, you know, not propagating certain prefixes to block access to Twitter, there are cops on the street looking at your phone, and you have no recourse. Correct?

Yeah. That that is happening, especially in the in the I mean, it can happen anytime.

It was very prevalent in the first few weeks after, the election results. It was Mhmm. It had it had it had it was twofold. On one side, it was trying to capture, folks who might be coming from a protest, going to a protest, or just might be interested in participating in protests. But at the same time, it created a lot of fear.

We saw during the first few weeks after the election, very intentional and very well designed campaign to create fear so that folks wouldn't go out to protest or, publish their opinions online. You would see uncommon things such as imagine imagine official social media accounts for security forces. This could be intelligence. This could be just put national police or, specific offices, like like penal investigation offices for police.

And then they would upload videos that are just, they they had, like, creepy music. They had many many horror movie tropes, and they were just basically it's it's hard to explain. If you see those videos, it's it's it's very it's it's very clear what they're trying to do. But, basically, they they capture snippets from social media of someone protesting or claiming doing something same things against the government or not recognizing the results they published.

And, and just immediately, they are they had the same script almost all the time. They're like a a creepy like like, the guy from Saw with a with a with a mask, or you have Chalky that possessed doll. And then you had, like, these commandos, like like, dropping out of helicopter sort of vans or stuff like that. And then they they'll capture the person, make the person ask for forgiveness on camera on the like like, while being held by the cops.

And it's like, I'm sorry if I insulted the president and stuff like that. And then after that, they're, like, close, like, a jail cell on top of them and and then put the logo of the of the of the cops. All of these through, like, with creepy music and creepy effects as if it was just a horror movie. There are hundreds of such videos online.

And and the the the president himself, he claimed that over two thousand people were just detained on the first few days after the election. And there he was just saying, we're going to open new state of the art prisons just to get all the news these news, new newly detained people that we're which had new thousands of folks who who just got detained, and we're gonna create new prisons, open new state of the art prisons just for them.

And and that's the kind of rhetoric. So so so here we saw the conjunction of Internet censorship, misinformation and disinformation, actual detention and repression on the streets, and Yep.

And these kinds of, social media posts to create fear.

All of them, like like, those four pillars, work together for even more, make each other more effective when they're used this way together than any of them individually. And that was what was happening.

And I can go on to more of the evidence tech going Venezuela, but Google off topic.

Can I just ask one may I may I ask, do do you or your colleagues face what are the risks that you guys face with the work that you do? Do you like, how would you answer that question?

Because it seems like challenging is kind of an understatement. Like, there's you guys face risk.

It is. And, and there's likely more of those risks coming. I mean, I would say that there's, like, on the horizon, there's a new set of laws targeting civil society that are, about to come into into place who are likely used as as legal basis or excuse to more widely, persecute civil society organizations.

We do try to minimize the number of folks in our organization that have, like, a public facing profile.

Some of some of the folks in our team work from abroad, but all part of our team, works inside of the country. And, and we just limit, the number of people inside of the country who had a have a public facing profile as much as possible. And since since this started happening after the election, we have, for example, stopped sharing videos with our face on.

We have started, making me being far more careful, but, like like, some folks have occasionally, like, being, like, spokesperson for the organization, but they've had to, like, seriously, like, close it down to to just, as the minimal crew, let's say, having public facing.

But you but you are a but you are a spokesperson or a, you know, a public figure in your organization.

And even then and even then, I haven't I haven't uploaded any videos, showing my face to our social media accounts recently just because I you never know who who who's gonna see you and say, oh, maybe that guy, that guy, the the next guy we're gonna get.

And now we also, like, turned down interviews in Spanish, or important interviews in Spanish. We have had to, like, I don't know, make sure someone from outside of the country is is is taking that interview. So, like, maybe I've been on the BBC, but not in CNN Spanish, because, like, has different audiences and and and that sort of, like, the kind of things we're trying to, separate so that they're not as visible inside the country. So, media can quote our publishing, like like, our posts or reports, but they they're not as likely to to be, like, I don't know, showing our face on Okay. On on TV or stuff like that that you can see here.

Now I noticed, just in in hearing the explanation of what the organization does, there are some parallels with the Internet Society. And we have interfaced with the Internet Society several times on this podcast several individuals over there, including, the person who runs the organization.

Is that the case with yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that the case with you, Andre? So are you, also do you also, from time to time, interface with Internet Society? Do you have a background with them at all?

Well, yes. I was president of the Venezuelan chapter, of ISOC. Okay.

And I was involved for many years in in in the chapter. I I continue to be a member and and collaborate with chapter leaders in in the country, but I don't have any specific responsibilities.

Mhmm. I've had I've tried to to make our data or analysis available for, some ISOC projects like, like Internet Pulse, I think it's called, with without a lot of success.

But, I I do think, like, ISOC's work in general is is is is very important.

I just I I, but I do think that ISOC's work internationally is very important.

ISOC chapters around the world have a tremendous impact. I just wish they could have, like, sometimes be stronger just to, like, push, for policies, that Yeah. Like, interducers are are all around the world. So so we need, like, we need, strong access chapters, I would say, and civil society in general, pushing for, local policies that facilitate, like, the developing of of of, Internet that re reaches and benefits all, in all of the countries.

And we also need, like, the, like, standard setting support Yeah.

That ISOC provides, as well as the, like, I don't know, opinion leadership that ISOC also provides on many other issues that are related to the Internet. And I think those are very important.

Yeah. And it it seems to me that that's where the two organizations diverge, whereas, they are for focused much more on policy and the opinion leadership, thought leadership that you mentioned. Whereas you are certainly involved with that, but much more from a technical perspective and and analyzing the data and then providing the data to hold, the, you know, the the nation and other organizations accountable for other activities.

I would have straight I do see that.

Yeah. And I would straight up saying that that our goal with measuring Internet censorship and doing advocacy around it is increase the political cost of Internet censorship to interesting. To to prevent more censorship to come or at least reduce the amount of censorship we're going to face in the future or, push for, a reversal on some censorship techniques. We have seen how, being fast and, strong, especially with with backing up international civil society about specific, censorship techniques in Venezuela and in many parts of the world, will lead to a more, better chances for that censorship measurement to be pulled down in order for the government still being able to save face.

If you come out, like, as soon as possible, like, hey. This is happening. Why why is x thing or or not x thing.

Something, being blocked. I mean, it could be x. And like it is, like, Venezuela blocked Twitter or x, and it's blocked currently. It also blocks Signal, the secure messaging app, which many many folks listening, should be aware, and those kinds of tools.

And, like, and many VPNs also. Like, you have very very common popular VPNs, services. Their websites are blocked, or the government actively tries to block or different ISPs actively try to block the functioning of of the VPN itself. So you have, like, I don't know, API servers or API, endpoints for VPN services, being blocked or like like, they try to actively block circumvention techniques in addition to just blocking websites and hoping hoping folks don't don't use VPNs.

They also, like, go go to the VPNs. But the idea the idea for us here is, again, document things, keep a record of those human rights violations, and also increase the political and reputational cost of censorship and other state sponsored attacks.

Yeah.

Yep. And metaphorically speaking, shining light on the methods and mechanisms used to censor an entire society, will adversely affect their ability to continue doing it. They're gonna have to become more sophisticated and, spend more money and more time and more resources.

And then in turn, you'll continue to shine that light. So they have to continually backpedal and be on the defensive. So that sounds like, the main underlying goal. Right?

Yeah. For sure. And it has been true. I mean With data, which you can't argue.

Exactly with data. And and and and if you have like, they will be more than content to just apply DNS blocking and for it to be the end of it. But but we are there, like, helping folks resist that Internet censorship. So, they have to Right.

Right. Go out different technologies, in order to to continue to have partially effective blocks or effective blocks, that go beyond DNS blocking, because people are then using, like, VPNs or other super convention techniques.

Andres, is there is there any ways that people in our audience, can can help your your cause or your effort?

What can what can people do if you were to ask, because you you've laid out a really compelling, mission of your organization. And I think I, along with probably a lot of people are thinking, like, is there something I can do to help?

Is there any anything we can do?

Well, I mean, I I don't have anything that I can, like, clearly say.

Like, I don't know if you're a if if you're a Flutter develop developer and just have, like, free time. I mean, sure. I mean, we we we we'll take those. We have our own technology that we provide for business owners.

So we have, for example, a anti censorship news reader that functions with VPN protocols and and even uses some VPNs, like, infrastructure from existing VPN providers and some of our own. But it's just a news reader, so it's like a more streamlined experience for less technical users in Venezuela. Just open the the news reader and have, like, a feed of news, and you click on it to see the website. But you have to, I don't know, log in to a VPN service or continue to pay it or stuff like that.

So we we have our own things. And and, I mean, there's some crisis moments when sometimes we just need, like, extra analysis eyes, to be honest. But most of the time Okay.

Maybe we could talk after the after the recording or maybe have any ideas that like, if you can contribute some way, or or maybe, like, hey.

Exactly. You can just email us. You can just email us, and and and after we vet, who you are because we can't obviously, just Sure. Sure. I don't know. Sometimes collaborate with folks.

Of course.

That we we don't know, their provenance. Like, because of the kind of thing we do and and the type of communities we serve.

But yeah. Like, if you have technical background and you think you can collaborate in some ways, like like, off the get go. If you have a Flutter develop if you're a Flutter developer developer, even if you don't speak Spanish and you have free time, we need one of those, like, ASAP.

What is it? A a Philip developer?

Yeah.

So Flutter is a Okay.

Filter is just, software development that the library Alright. Tool from Google for mobile apps.

I and just I don't know. We just we just need someone.

But but yeah. Like like, I don't know. If you're a, you're DevOps, expert or something. We're like, we do have, like, some needs.

The thing is very hard for me to just, like, list them, but we do have some technical needs.

Yeah. Sure.

I guess I I guess if nothing if nothing else, we can all give you a a retweet or a Sure.

Exactly.

For a, follow you and try to extend your your your public, message, to a lot wider audience.

So because you have a a public advocacy, mission as well that, anybody with a computer might be able to, retreats are free.

Little part there. Okay. That's right. So far as of today.

Andres, it really has been a pleasure to have you today.

Really interesting conversation, and, thank you so much for the work that you and and your organization, those in your organization do. We we appreciate that.

Now for finding out more information, where can folks find you, your organization, or whatever you wanna point people to online?

Well, I would say that the most significant place I can point folks are is vesinfiltro.org, which is gonna be messy to to to spell out. But maybe it's in the show notes.

Or Yeah.

v e s i n f i l t r o

Yeah. So so that's our that's the website. Not for the whole of the organization, but our, let's say, documentation, program, our human rights documentation program. And we often publish in Spanish, but occasionally publish in English as well. And, and that's where we publish our reports, our analysis, and many of the most significant alerts. Also, on Twitter or x, it's a good place to follow us. We have many other social things, but, those are the ones that are, I think, more relevant for an English speaking audience outside of the country.

Alright. Well, we're gonna end it here. Again, thank you, Andres, and thank you, Doug, for joining. Now if you have an idea for an episode or you'd like to be a guest on Telemetry Now, I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at telemetrynow@kentik.com. So for now, thanks so much for listening today. Bye bye.