Implement service to alert to potential Internet/telecommunications blackouts

[gnarea]

Executive summary

We'll eventually need a system to track potential Internet blackouts in the future so that we can prepare for them properly for three reasons:

• To help (prospective) users and couriers be prepared whilst they still have Internet connectivity (see Support the onboarding of users during an Internet blackout #1 and Support the onboarding of couriers during an Internet blackout #2)
• For Relaycorp employees (e.g., SREs) to be prepared for unusual traffic patterns.
• For Awala service providers to allow delays in time-sensitive operations from users in the affected regions (I know of at least one prospective service provider who would need this).

Long description

The plan is basically to rate the likelihood of an Internet/telecommunications blackout due to a future event, such as controversial elections in a country where the Internet has been cut off in the past, for example.

The input data should ideally be crowdsourced. For example, people could be editing YAML files in a GitHub repo.

This data should be exposed in a number of ways:

• A web interface with deeplinks to country- or region-specific information. This could be a static website.
• .ical files that people like me could add to their calendars. There could be country-specific calendars.
• RSS feeds or webhooks to automatically notify systems about this. This could be migrated to Service Message Broadcasts in the future for scalability and dogfooding purposes.
• Automated posting to social networks.

This would be open source (obviously), and it'd be great to partner with others in the censorship measurement space. This could be hosted on blackout.observer.

Note that we're only interested in Internet blackouts, not shutdowns (which can be circumvented with Tor/VPNs). However, if anyone wants to build and maintain the functionality to report on future shutdowns, they'd be welcome to do so. I've also registered shutdown.observer in case the project evolves into that.

Alternatives considered

We could keep the monitoring informal and manual, with no automation whatsoever. That's what we have to do for now anyway, and it's also a great way to learn what we actually need. But I don't think a manual/informal process will be sustainable for too long.

I also did some research but could not find anything that would satisfy the requirements above. All the initiatives I've found measure/analyse past and/or ongoing Internet blackouts, but no-one seems to be systematically documenting Internet/telecommunications blackouts that could happen in the future -- the closest thing to this is the Access Now blog which occasionally highlights potential blackouts (but most posts are unrelated).