Russia’s Duma has approved the bill to prohibit tools used to surf outlawed websites

Russia is going to tighten controls on web services, on Friday, the parliament voted to prohibit web tools that could be used to surf outlawed websites.

Recently Russian authorities threatened to ban to ban Telegram because it refused to comply data protection laws.

On Friday, the Russia’s parliament voted to ban web tools that could be used by people to surf outlawed websites.

In the same day, the Duma also approved the proposed bill to oblige anyone using an online message service to identify themselves with a telephone number.

Russia is going to tighten controls on web services, for this reason, members the Duma passed the questionable bill. The bill will prohibit the use of any service from the Russian territory if they could be used to access blacklisted websites.

In case the law will be approved by the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament and by President Vladimir Putin, the Roskomnadzor will manage a list of anonymizer services and will ban them if they will be not compliant with access restrictions ordered by the Russian Government.

Privacy advocates groups fear the bill that is considered too restrictive and could open the door to a strict censorship, Government opposition groups heavily rely on such kind of technology to extend their protest abroad.

Let me close with a look at the Tor Metrics and Russia people accessing the popular anonymizing service.

The data related to the top-10 countries by estimated number of directly-connecting clients shows that Russia is at the third place.

Country	Mean daily users
United States	437521 (20.01 %)
United Arab Emirates	320743 (14.67 %)
Russia	213318 (9.76 %)
Ukraine	180847 (8.27 %)
Germany	176053 (8.05 %)
France	87925 (4.02 %)
United Kingdom	75001 (3.43 %)
Canada	41001 (1.88 %)
Netherlands	40586 (1.86 %)
Italy	37230 (1.70 %)

 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – outlawed websites, Duma)

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