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Venezuela’s government has been gradually expanding its capacity to censor and surveil, to criminalize speech, and to undermine activists, and these most recent blocks are a worrying step further down that path. Under these conditions, anonymity tools like Tor are especially crucial for activists, independent journalists, and civil society actors to stay safe online. Netizens, like Jaimes Criollo, are being detained for their online speech, and tortured to reveal their social media passwords. Soon after the protests started, the government declared a state of emergency (the State of Exception and Economic Emergency), stripped the Parliament of its legislative power, set up an unconstitutional Constituent Assembly, used excessive force to quell protests, arrested and detained protesters and opposition groups, and tortured dissenting voices.
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Since 2016, Venezuela has been rocked by a series of protests due to worsening economic and political conditions.
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“We call on Venezuela’s government to reverse course, refrain from imposing further censorship, and to restore the free and open communications that are vital to any healthy democracy.” “Restricting access to information, and the tools necessary to access that information safely, is a flagrant violation of human rights by the Venezuelan government,” said Javier Pallero, Latin America Policy Lead at Access Now. This kind of intentional blocking of an entire platform constitutes an internet shutdown under the definition supported by the #KeepItOn coalition, a global movement of civil society organizations fighting to prevent internet shutdowns and defend free expression online. Reports further analyzing the technical details of the Tor network block are forthcoming. This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet,” said Andrés Azpúrua, Director of Venezuela Inteligente, an organization documenting technical evidence of the Tor block and other censorship events in Venezuela through its project VE sin Filtro. “This is the latest escalation in Venezuela’s internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods. “The government is moving forward to be as closed as China or Iran.” It’s not only on the direct access channels, but also the bridges Tor provides to bypass that blocking,” said Melanio Escobar, Venezuelan technologist and journalist, and founder of Redes Ayuda.
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“It seems that the government of Venezuela has found out how to do a very sophisticated block for the Tor network. This increased use of Tor to access blocked content is likely what triggered these new restrictions to the tool. Instead, people have needed to rely on using virtual private networks (VPNs) and Tor to circumvent government censorship. While previous online censorship in Venezuela could often be avoided by switching DNS settings from a local Venezuelan server to an international service (like Google’s public DNS), this has not been possible for the most recent blocks. These most recent blocks have affected several major Venezuelan news outlets, including El Nacional and La Patilla, among others. J(VENEZUELA) - Access Now’s partners have confirmed that the Tor network - a widely used tool allowing users to browse the internet anonymously - was blocked in Venezuela last week over the government-owned internet service provider CANTV, by far the largest ISP in the country.ĭirect access traffic on the Tor network steadily increased in Venezuela over the past two months, and even more sharply this month via Tor bridges - alongside a new wave of online censorship from the Maduro government.