For years, the anonymity service Tor is the best way to stay private online and avoid web censorship. To the fury of governments and law enforcement agencies, Tor encrypts your web traffic and sends it through a series of computers, making it very hard for people to follow you online. Authoritarian governments see it as something special threat and in recent months, Russia has stepped up its long-term ambition to block Tor – albeit not without a fight.
In December 2021, the Russian media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issued a 4-year-old court order allowing it to order Internet service providers (ISPs) to block the Tor Project website, where the Tor Browser can be downloaded, and restrict access to its services. Since then, censors have been engaged in a battle with Tor’s tech team and users in Russia, who are doing everything they can to keep the Tor network online and give people access to the uncensored web, what else? severely restricted in the country.
Russia’s efforts to block Tor come in two flavors: technical and political. So far, Tor has had some success on both fronts. It has found ways to avoid Russian blocking attempts, and this month it was DELETED from the Russian list of blocked websites after a legal challenge. (Although this does not mean that blocking attempts will end immediately.)
“We are being attacked by the Russian government, they are trying to block Tor,” said Gustavo Gus, community team leader of the Tor project. In recent months, Russian officials have adjusted their tactics, Gus says, while the Tor project’s anti-censorship engineers have successfully launched updates to prevent the services from being blocked. “The battle isn’t over yet,” Gus says. “People can connect to Tor. People can easily get around the censorship.”
In Russia, the internet infrastructure is relatively decentralized: ISPs can receive blocking orders from Roskomnadzor, but it is up to individual companies to implement them. (China is the only country that effectively blocked Tor, which was possible because of) more centralized internet control). While the Russian authorities have been installing new equipment that uses deep package inspection to monitor and block online services, the effectiveness of these blocks is mixed.
“The censorship taking place in Russia is not constant and uniform,” Gus says. Gus explains that due to different ISPs, Tor can be blocked for some people, but not for others, even people in the same city. Both Tor statistics and external analysis seem to show the declining effectiveness of Russian censorship.
Tor data shows that since the end of 2021 there has been a big fall in the number of people connecting directly to Tor in Russia. However, people can connect to its services using volunteer-run bridges-access points to the network that cannot be easily blocked because their data is not public – and Tor’s anti-censorship tool Snowflake. External data from the internet monitoring group Open Observatory of Network Interference shows a big increase in people in Russia using Tor with Snowflake.