If you want to know how it feels to be a political dissident under a repressive regime, you do not have to travel to China or Iran or Russia or Saudi Arabia etc.
Just try to access the main European Commission website http://ec.europa.eu using the Tor Browser Bundle anonymity (and web browsing security) software. https://torproject.org
This is the astonishing reply from the European Commission when you enquire about this repressive nonsense:
Dear Sir,
Please find bellow the answer from EC's officials regarding your issue:
"We fully understand this citizen's request and also agree that he has the right to stay anonymous when accessing the Commission europa websites. But the Commission is obliged to keep the Commission websites available for all citizens. You can only realise this objective by implementing security measures, in this case preventing cyber-attacks that typically use the TOR network or similar VPN mechanisms. So to satisfy the higher rights of the general public, you are forced to block the TOR network and some other similar services, which implicitly blocks the possibility of some individuals to use anonymous access.
It should however be noted that The Commission strictly respects the Personal Data Protection legislation, which assures citizens that their IP-addresses won't be used for illicit purposes. This principle protects therefore the anonymity of the europa websites users."
For your information, your request will be closed.
Thank you for your understanding,Best regards,
{name]
Security Engineer SNET
Belgacom - Dimension Data
[phone]
[email address]
SNet/EC support
+32 (0) 2 29 63931
snet@ec.europa.eu
-----Original Message-----
From: [email]
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 1:08 PM
To: DIGIT SNET
Subject: Great Firewall of Europe - why are you blocking Tor users from
ec.europa.eu ?Why are you blocking access to the European Commission website
http://ec.europa.eu by Tor users (https://torproject.org) ?How is such Chinese / Iranian style "Great Firewall of Europe"
style censorship compatible with the fundamental rights which the
European Union promotes ?regards
[name]
1) What is the name of the official ( or at least the department) which has issued this controversial and unnecessary censorship policy ?
2) Tor is not useful for Denial of Service attacks - it uses full TCP connections and does not support UDP
3) Attempts at "armchair hacktivist" style web page / web log "sit in protest" clictivism are much more likely to overload parts of the the Tor cloud infrastructure than the European Commission website. Standard javascript "bait and switch" targeting tools like LOIC etc favoured by the easily fooled "Anonymous" band wagon followers do not use Tor to try to hide their originating IP addresses.
4) There could, perhaps be a case for Tor users to be blocked from setting up accounts or editing wiki pages or leaving comments on forums or blogs hosted by the European Commission. However, what they have done is to disproportionately filter even read only access to their entire web site by innocent Tor users..
5) What other " similar VPN mechanisms" are also being blocked ?
6) Claiming that because "IP-addresses won't be used for illicit purposes" by the European Commission, that this somehow "protects therefore the anonymity of the europa websites users." is nonsense ! Some important users of http://ec.europa.eu live under repressive regimes and some are under illegal surveillance even within the European Union.
How does blocking access to Tor users protect the IP addresses and identities of, say, Syrian or Byelorussian activists trying to find the contact details of European Union officials and diplomats on the European Commission website, from their evil local government ? They cannot risk having to use non-anonymised connections to the European Union websites, as these are used as intelligence or evidence of "foreign espionage" activities, thereby putting the activists' lives at risk.
7) What sort of a diplomatic message does this censorship policy send to repressive regimes around the world, which the European Union supposedly criticises for their
internet censorship schemes ?
8) Instead of the European Commission blocking Tor users, they should pro-actively make their website available to people living under repressive regimes who cannot access it because of country wide censorship, by also publishing it as a Tor Hidden Service
9) If this anti-Tor mindset within the European Commission is allowed to fester, it will malignly influence European Union policy directives affecting the fundamental rights of 450 million innocent European Union citizens.
This technological ignorance coupled with control freakery and Orwellian newspeak tainted lip service to fundamental human rights is exactly the sort of evil which we suffered under NuLabour and which the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition government promised to reform.
Will no Euro-Sceptic politicians get the European Commission to reverse this repressive policy of theirs ?
For now (just before Christmas 2013) it appears that the European Commission have removed the blanket ban on Tor users trying to access the
http://ec.europa.eu
multi-lingual web portal and subordinate websites
http://www.mail-archive.com/tor-talk@lists.torproject.org/msg11541.html
This may have happened in October 2013, but we have only noticed this now, just before Christmas, because this "Great FireWall of Europe" ban has discouraged us from bothering to engage with the European Commision at all i.e. it has had a chilling effect on our freedom of speech and other Article 10 rights
" to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers"
It has stupidly created resentment against the European Union as an institution.
It is too early to tell if this a deliberate policy decision by EU control freak bureaucrats and politicians, or if it is a just a by product of the technical attempts to clean up the persistent GCHQ malware which useded to attack the Belgacom ISP (and other snooping on the European Union) revealed in the leaks to the media by Edward Snowden.