MOSCOW, February 5 (RAPSI) - Leonid Levin, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Information Policy and Communications, suggested to restrict access to the Internet privacy service Tor, TASS reported on Thursday.

Speaking at the national IT security conference - Infoforum 2015, Levin said that Parliament should consider pre-trial blocking of anonymizers and access devices for Tor anonymous networks. He believes the measure could not only help restrict access to banned information but also increase chances of preventing the distribution of malicious software and illicit access to computer data.

Tor is a data transmission network based on the onion routing technology. It is a system of proxy servers which allow anonymous network connection that is protected from surveillance. Source, recipient and the content of the message remain unknown while the routing is usually random.

This technology, developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory for its own purposes, was declassified in 2002 and handed over to civilian programmers for further development.