Tor decided to appeal the blocking in Russia

An appeal has been filed against the decision to block the Tor browser site.

On January 11, 2022, the lawyers of Roskomsvoboda filed in the interests of The Tor Project Inc. an appeal against the decision of the Saratov District Court, which recognized the information on the main page of the Tor project as prohibited for distribution.

The decision to block the page was made back in December 2017 on the grounds that it is possible to download the anonymous Tor browser from it and use it to visit sites with extremist materials. In December 2021, Roskomnadzor demanded that The Tor Project Inc. remove prohibited information and began to restrict the browser.

According to Roskomsvoboda, the court's decision violates the constitutional right to freely provide, receive and disseminate information and protect privacy. It was also considered without the participation of Tor representatives, which violated their procedural rights and the competitiveness of the process, the organization notes.

We consider unlawful decisions to block means of anonymizing traffic on the Internet, which were issued by Russian courts (mainly until 2017, when a separate mechanism for blocking VPNs and anonymizers was introduced). By themselves, such technical means do not contain any prohibited information, and access to prohibited materials can also be carried out through other tools, including through a conventional search engine, since it has not yet been possible to completely remove them from the global network. A similar logic is followed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in its judgment "Engels v. Russia". According to the Strasbourg Court, the idea of ​​banning information about technologies for accessing information is not fundamentally different from the idea of ​​banning printers and copiers on the grounds that they can be used to replicate extremist materials.

Sources

• Yulia Stepanova. The hammer will come in handy in court // Kommersant. January 24, 2022
• The Tor Project and Roskomsvoboda will appeal the blocking of Tor in court // Roskomsvoboda. January 24, 2022