The court blocked Tor again

The court in Saratov reconsidered the demands of the prosecutor's office to ban the anonymous Tor browser and satisfied them.

On July 28, 2022, the Leninsky District Court of Saratov re-examined the suit of the prosecutor's office to block the anonymous Tor browser and partially satisfied the requirements of the department. The information contained in the Tor Browser application and the application itself hosted on Google Play are recognized as prohibited for distribution in Russia. In addition, the court singled out the prosecutor's claim against Google LLC for the removal of Tor Browser from the application store as a separate proceeding.

Initially, the Saratov court made a decision back in December 2017, it provided for a ban on the Tor Project website on the grounds that it is possible to use the Tor browser and visit sites with extremist materials through it. In December 2021, Roskomnadzor demanded that The Tor Project Inc. remove prohibited information and began to restrict the browser. In January 2022, Roskomsvoboda lawyers filed in the interests of The Tor Project Inc. the appeal, which on May 19 the Saratov Regional Court satisfied and sent the case for a new trial. After that, in July, Roskomnadzor lifted the blocking.

Roskomsvoboda intends to appeal against the new decision of the Saratov court. According to the lawyers of the project, in accordance with chapter 27.1 of the CAS , information, but not applications or technologies, can be prohibited. At the same time, anonymizers can be blocked extrajudicially by decision of the Prosecutor General's Office, but only if they do not comply with the established operating procedure.

We also consider unlawful decisions on blocking 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

• Court bans 'information in Tor Browser app' // Roskomsvoboda. 2022. July 28.