Russia Offers 2.6m Rouble Bounty for Help Identifying ‘Users of Tor’

Russia’s interior ministry has offered 3.9 million roubles to anyone who can develop software capable of identifying users of Tor, the anonymous Internet browsing platform, The Guardian reports.

Tor conceals it’s users from probing observers by hiding the origin and destination of information traveling across the Internet. According to The Guardian, surveillance and security expert Andrewi Soldatov described Russian authorities’ public announcement of the effort to eliminate this kind of capability as a “signal” to the Russian people that they are being watched. In May the government blocked three major news sites that published work that opposed president Vladimir Putin and required that all sites that had more than 3,000 daily visitors join a registry.

The government also recently adopted a law requiring all Russian Internet companies to store Russian user data in Russia. England passed very similar legislation earlier this month. Calling it “emergency surveillance legislation,” it forces phone and Internet companies to retain data and hand it over to English security services.

According to web entrepreneur Anton Nosik, the 3.9 million rouble bounty will likely do nothing to bring the Russian government closer to identifying Tor users. “The only significance [of the tender] is the money being paid and the PR surrounding it, showing that the ministry of interior is seriously working on issues of anonymising technology, so that everybody’s talking about it. And everybody is talking about it,” Nosik said in The Guardian.

More worrying, Nosik continued, was leading communications provider Rostelecom’s investment in technology that would filter web traffic based on its content rather than its source. “Deep Packet Inspection,” as it’s called, would severely reduce users’ anonymity on the web, although Tor should be able to limit DPI capabilities, Nosik said.

Read more here.

—Posted by Donald Kaufman. 

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