Russian consumer watchdog Roskomnadzor has announced it has banned six more VPN products and the web anonymity service Tor.
“A request was sent to the departments with a request to inform the Center for Monitoring and Control of the Public Communications Network (CMU SSOP) about the use of VPN services (Betternet, Lantern, X-VPN, Cloudflare WARP, Tachyon VPN, PrivateTunnel) to ensure the work of technological processes of enterprises and organizations,” said Roskomnadzor.
According to Roskomnadzor, the VPN services have failed to abide by their demands to connect their systems to the FGIS database after asking them to comply in 2019.
Registering with the FGIS database, however, would make the VPNs useless.
Roskomnadzor also said it included the TOR browser website in its register of banned internet services because it allegedly had “information that ensures the operation of tools that provide access to illegal content.”
“Since December 1, some Internet providers in Russia have begun to block access to Tor. Today we learned that Roskomnadzor <…> is threatening to block our main site,” said Tor developers.
The Tor developer’s website had already been added to Roskomnadzor’s registry of sites that contain “prohibited information” in 2017 but Russian citizens could still access the site.