Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is one of the most famous figures that uses Tor the internet anonymity tool to leak documents he acquired. With Tor, Snowden, among many documents he had leaked, also alleged that the NSA and the UK's GCHQ had repeatedly tried to crack anonymity on the Tor network.
Russia's Interior Ministry is offering a contract worth 3.9 million rubles ($110,000) "to study the possibility of obtaining technical information on users and users' equipment of Tor anonymous network," according to an announcement posted on the government's website for state purchases.
The free software, engineered by the nonprofit Tor Project, sends each user's traffic across various nodes around the globe, encrypting it at every layer and making it extremely difficult to track. Tor is popular among hackers, criminals and political dissidents worldwide, and Russians have been especially receptive to Snowden's calls. The number of Tor users in the country tripled in 2014 to more than 150,000, according to data from the Tor Project.
The proliferation of Tor in Russia has been stoked partially by the revelations around U.S. government surveillance. But it's also taken off due to a rising fear of the Kremlin. Since then, President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on the internet, and signed a law requiring Google, Facebook and other internet companies, including the country's social network VKontakte, to store data on Russian users within the country.
