The Tor Project has appealed a Russian court’s decision to block Tor sites in the country.
The Tor network is an open source system for anonymous online communication. Also known as the Onion Router, the network is used to circumvent censorship and is widely accessed by civil rights activists, whistleblowers, lawyers, human rights defenders and those under oppressive regimes.
On Monday, the network’s developers said appeal A lawsuit has been filed against the Saratov District Court’s decision to block the Russian website torproject.org.
An appeal has been filed between the Tor Project and the Russian digital rights protection agency RosKomSvoboda.
On December 6, 2021, the Tor Project was informed that its website would be blocked under Section 15.1 of the Information Act. Public proxy servers and some bridges in the country are also blocked, with Tor developers noticing blocks across Russia over the past month.
According to Tor, the court’s decision was not based on anything specific.Instead, Russian authorities decided that the site needed to be blocked because it allowed “downloads” [of] An anonymous browser program for subsequent visits to websites containing material from the Federal List of Extremist Material. ”
roscomswoboda Lawyers represent the Tor Project. According to the civil rights group, the ban “violates the constitutional right to freely provide, receive and impart information and to protect privacy.”
Furthermore, the decision may also be considered problematic because “the case was considered without the participation of Tor representatives, which violated their procedural rights and the competitiveness of the process”.
Tor says Russian users account for the country’s second-largest user base, with more than 300,000 daily users.
One mirror version The Tor website is sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
“With the help of Roskomsvoboda lawyers Sarkis Darbinyan and Ekaterina Abashina, we will appeal the court decision and hope to rectify the situation and help set a precedent for the protection of digital rights in Russia,” commented Tor Project Executive Director Isabela Bageros.
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