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Russia Seeking To Ban Tor, VPNs and Other Anonymizing Tools

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-secrets dept.

An anonymous reader writes Three separate Russian authorities have spoken out in favor of banning online anonymizing tools since February 5th, with particular emphasis on Tor, which — despite its popularity with whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden and with online activists — Russia's Safe Internet League describes as an 'Anonymous network used primarily to commit crimes'. The three authorities involved are the Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, powerful Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor and the Safe Internet League, comprising the country's top three network providers, including state telecoms provider Rostelecom. Roskomnadzor's press secretary Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky describes the obstacles to identifying and blocking Tor and VPN traffic as "difficult, but solvable."

4 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. We need a distributed Tor immedietly by buddha379 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Tor and other centralized VPN proxies are coming under attack from authoritarian/totalitarian governments all over the world. China started assaulting VPNs recently as well. The Arab dictatorships won't be far behind. As long as there are central servers to ban/block/attack then there is no way to stop them. Eventually they will seize control of their local internet and cut themselves off from the world. There is only one answer.

    We need a distributed VPN/Proxy.

    We need a ubiquitous p2p proxy that is both a client and server. It needs to be ridiculously easy to set up, as in download it, click a few buttons and you are browsing the web through random onion routing and allowing others to do the same. 100s of millions of server/clients cannot be shut down if they run over https.

    Lantern may fit the bill. https://www.getlantern.org/ If there are others they need to get funding and widespread publicity as quickly as possible.

  2. It's only a matter of time by ddtmm · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I can see annoying tools being banned in North America at some point. Maybe not personal and business VPNs, but anonymizing services in general. I don't agree with it but we see our online rights being chipped aways slowly but surely, especially in Canada.

  3. This sounds vaguely familiar ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... oh, here it is.

    “If we find evidence of a terrorist plot and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that [encryption], that’s a problem,” Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. “They’re patriots.” ...

    Emphasis mine.

    --
    It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    1. Re:This sounds vaguely familiar ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is an overall problem in the USA, and it doesn't matter who you vote for.

      Of course it does. If you limit yourself to the Republicans or the Democrats it doesn't matter which one you vote for, but any vote for a third party makes a difference.
      You don't need a majority of the votes make your voice heard, not when the major parties only cares about power. If a third party get the number of votes that makes the difference between them then they represent a large enough group of voters to remove the power from one party and give it to the other. That is sufficient to make them both listen very closely to what you have to say.

      Now, if one of the major parties actually had an ideology that is opposed to yours that would be another thing, but they only care about power.