This workshop, co-organized by DIGISOV, the Citizen Lab and GEODE, will take place on 21 May 2025, from 9:30 to 17:00, in Paris 17th (CNRS Pouchet) and by videoconference.
To participate, please register.
Presentation
Digital sovereignty is an increasing concern for some and a rallying cry for others. This contested concept is often instrumentalized to justify strict control over internet traffic, infrastructure, and online content. At the same time, it is invoked to promote visions of technological autonomy. The recent policy shift in the United States has prompted the EU and Canada to reassess their infrastructural dependencies and accelerate their own moves toward digital sovereignty. Meanwhile, countries such as Cuba, China, Russia, Myanmar, and Iran are developing sophisticated techno-legal frameworks for national internets.
How can we grasp and make sense of digital sovereignties in all their diversity? What analytical tools can we use to trace and understand these developments? This interdisciplinary workshop brings together social scienists, computer scientists and engineers to share methods and frameworks for describing, analyzing—and perhaps even anticipating—the global trend toward sovereign networks.
The first part of the workshop features case study presentations followed by a moderated discussion. The second part includes hands-on sessions introducing software tools for measuring and visualizing internet connectivity, traffic filtering, and network fragmentation.
Program
9:30 / Doors open, registration, coffee
9:45 / Introduction by Ksenia Ermoshina (CIS CNRS)
MEASURING (EVERYTHING): CASE-STUDIES
10:00 / Charlotte Escorne (GEODE) – Measuring Mobile Connectivity in Senegal: Challenges, Method and Solution(s)
10:20 / Jeffrey Knockel (Citizen Lab) – New Methods for Measuring Automated Censorship on WeChat
10:40 / Maximilian Mayer (University of Bonn) – The Digital Dependencies Index: an approach to strenghtening Europe’s tech autonomy
Coffee break and pastries
11:30 / Ksenia Ermoshina (CIS CNRS), Bill Marczak (Citizen Lab) – Inside the Russian sovereign surveillance machinery: a mixed-methods study of the SORM surveillance system
11:50 / Irene Poetranto and Jeffrey Knockel (Citizen Lab) – DNS Redirection for Censorship in Southeast Asia: Research Methods and Policy Implications
12:10 / Célestine Rabouam (GEODE) – Measuring the evolution of technological dependence on satellite and US infrastructure in the Canadian Arctic: the case of Nunavut
13:00 to 14:00 / Lunch break
WORKSHOPS
14:00 to 15:30 / GEODE: MAPPING DATA INFRASTRUCTURES FOR GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSIS
The GEODE research center (Geopolitics of the Datasphere) has explored various approaches to understanding connectivity architectures in diverse geopolitical environments. As political discourse increasingly emphasizes data sovereignty and control over data flows, accurately mapping these networks has become more crucial than ever. One of our primary and ongoing objectives is to uncover the geopolitical factors that shape network structures. The increasing political foci in discourses on the sovereignty of data hosting and data flows makes it more and more relevant to be able to map accurately these networks. Another key goal is to make complex and often obscure datasets accessible to social scientists, including Master’s students with no prior experience in network analysis.
To achieve this, GEODE, in collaboration with the French Institute of Geopolitics and its spinoff Cassini Conseil, has developed several tools designed to produce, visualize, and analyze Internet infrastructure data through a geopolitical lens.
This workshop will introduce these tools, explaining how they function, how they are built, and what data sources they utilize.
1. Infrastructure Mapping Tool: This tool combines data from physical infrastructure sources (e.g. ITU, Internet Atlas) with logical infrastructure (e.g. PeeringDB), providing a comprehensive visualization of network architecture.
2. Internet Connectivity Pipeline (« BGP observatory »): This pipeline leverages data from RIPE RIS and Routeviews to construct snapshot graphs of global connectivity. To enhance the robustness of these visualizations at the Autonomous System (AS) level, we integrate third-party data sources, including CAIDA, PCH, and the IIJ’s Internet Health Report. We then use the open source graph visualization software Gephi (and Adobe Illustrator) to provide meaningful representations of the network.
3. Traceroute Visualization Tool: Designed for use with RIPE Atlas, this tool offers a clear representation of traceroute data. Additionally, we have developed a mobile RIPE Atlas probe that can be installed on smartphones, enabling customizable geolocated network measurements from regions with limited infrastructure.
15:30 to 17:00 / MAPPING DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY WITH OONI PROBE
Moderator: Elizaveta, OONI
As part of the CNRS workshop on mapping internet fragmentation, we would want to propose to investigate OONI data as one of the data sources for the mapping of digital sovereignty.
OONI tests websites from local vantage points, identifying server locations, collecting information about networks serving the content, detecting DNS resolutions, and capturing HTTP response headers. These tests are run automatically from thousands of different network vantage points all over the world on a regular basis and can be used to map the trends and patterns of local internet infrastructure fragmentation.
As part of our new data processing pipeline work we are already extracting a lot of metadata related to OONI measurements which can be used to analyse and map internet traffic. During this workshop, together with researchers, we want to understand better how our data fits the ongoing research and collect feedback on which data points are currently missing but could be useful for various research goals.