
The same Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) system was used to throttle Twitter earlier this year and to silence the Smart Voting website developed by jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny. According to GlobalCheck, a project that studies local blocking and assists users to bypass restrictive measures, the TSPU (technical tools to counter threats) system has been deployed against some Tor nodes. Since the start of December, efforts have been underway to begin the not-insignificant task of blocking Tor.

Of course, when times got really tough there was always the robust, privacy-focused Tor network to fall back on but if the past few days are anything to go by, even this old faithful could find itself severely compromised, at least in Russia. It is a large community which will find the means to finance the organization of getting around blocking in Russia,” Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Defence Society, a non-profit group looking to fight online censorship in Russia, said to Reuters.In an effort to control what its citizens can and cannot access on the internet, Russia continues to develop systems for denying access to websites and services.įrom copyright infringing content to terrorist propaganda (and whatever the government deems offensive in between), Russia is determined to implement restrictions on Internet users, regardless of the broader implications.Īt least initially, local users confidently utilized tools including VPNs to circumvent censorship but with rising pressure from the authorities, even these have come under threat, despite the consequences. “Blocking Tor would be practically impossible.
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“Teaching users how to bypass censorship and how to get the official Tor Browser version using GetTor or a mirror will be crucial,” Tor added. 1, and Tor encouraged its users to bypass the block by visiting its mirror site, which was still operational. In its blog post, Tor said some internet providers in Russia had actually started blocking access to the service on Dec. This figure makes up around 14% of all daily Tor users and is second only to the United States. According to Tor, it has more than 300,000 users in Russia alone. The Tor Network is used to hide the computer IP addresses and identities of internet users. Without access to its service, Tor said that hundreds of thousands of people would no longer have an anonymous way to communicate within Russia. Reuters also reported that Roskomnadzor said, “Foreign entities are required to limit access to information that violates Russian legislation.” Significance However, this might become difficult as the Russian government has targeted blocking traffic from a VPN.Īlso, according to a Reuters report last month, Russia has increasingly put pressure on non-Russia tech companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, to open an office inside Russia.


“Today, access to the resource has been restricted.”Īs a possible alternative, users in Russia could use a top paid virtual private network (VPN), like Private Internet Access, in order to bypass internet restrictions in Russia - and connect to a server in a different country to access the Tor network. “The grounds for this were the placement of information on this website that enable the operation of tools that provide access to unlawful content,” Roskomnadzor said in a statement. Roskomnadzor said the website been prohibited on the basis of a court decision.

The Russian communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, accused the service of enabling access to what it labeled as illegal content. The Russian government has added more internet censorship by blocking the Tor website, according to a blog post by the service.
