[tor-project] Ministry of finance advises against blocking of Tor

[Jens Kubieziel]

Hi,

tl,dr: The ministry of finance of the German state of Thuringia advises
against the blocking of the Tor network.

Longer version: In march I tried to reach <URL:https://tmasgff.de/>, the
website of the ministry of social affairs of Thuringia. However their
provider, Alfahosting, was blocking Tor traffic. So I reached out to the
ministry and asked why this is so. They answered that there is a huge
amount of hacking traffic coming from the Tor network. That's Why all
traffic coming from Tor is blocked.

So I made an FOIA-like request (Thuringia has a transparency law) and
asked how many attacks they saw from the Tor network and from the
non-Tor network:
<URL:http://fdstaat23zv6kdmntgkvdzkr7hipl5oqswwi3xawzkj2w2gwsbxmrwyd.onion/a/181821>

After some back and forth they told me, that their provider won't answer
the request for "security reasons". The ministry requested a statement
from the CI(S)O of the state which resides inside the ministry of
finance. He answered that providing information to users from the Tor
network is no special risk and the ministry won't recommend blocking the
Tor network. Since the the site <URL:https://tmasgff.de/> is available.

Best,


-- 
Jens Kubieziel                                https://kubieziel.de/blog/
                                              https://datenkanal.org/
                                              https://insecurity.radio.fm/