Belarus Authorities Switch on Automatic Blocking of Anonymizers

The com­pa­ny looked for an autom­a­tized sys­tem to block not only banned web­sites, but also anonymiz­ers and proxy-servers when used to access the banned web­sites; ear­li­er, the lists of anonymiz­ers were com­piled indi­vid­u­al­ly by employ­ees of the enter­prise.

Judg­ing by the doc­u­ments, the auto­mat­ic sys­tem was pur­chased on Novem­ber 3 from the Belaru­sian joint-stock com­pa­ny Com­pliTech. The com­pa­ny had also pro­duced sys­tems for mon­i­tor­ing of for­est fires, for dis­patch com­mu­ni­ca­tion and for med­ical reg­is­tra­tion. The auto­mat­ic sys­tem cost 878 986 080 rubles, or around 45,000 USD.

Bel­GIE added that there had been five com­peti­tors in the ten­der, three of them com­mer­cial. The deci­sive cri­te­ri­on, in addi­tion to effec­tive­ness, was cheap­er price. Now, accord­ing to the agency, the web­sites blocked in Belarus under the law will be inac­ces­si­ble also via anonymiz­ers. How­ev­er, Belaru­sian users will be able to use anonymiz­ers to access any oth­er web­sites.

On Feb­ru­ary 19, 2015, the Oper­a­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter intro­duced the rul­ing stat­ing that the State inspec­tion of the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Informa­ti­za­tion shall block access not only to banned web­sites, but also to anonymiz­ers and proxy-servers, like Tor. The rul­ing went into legal force on the day of pub­li­ca­tion.

Relat­ed:

Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion Blocks 40 Web­sites, 11 of them Extrem­ist