Fine Gael TD for Limerick, O'Donovan is by background an industrial chemist and the youngest Fine Gael Group Leader in the group's history - but that hasn't stopped him from apparently claiming that open source technologies are the root of all that is evil in the digital world.' claimed O'Donovan in a statement published to the Fine Gael website O'Donovan appears to have confused the issue of the TOR Project, an open-source effort to create an anonymising proxy network from volunteer machines, with open-source web browsers like Firefox and Chromium - the former of which has been put forward as a champion against NSA intrusion thanks to its easily-accessible source code and ongoing code validation programme.TOR, it's true, allows access to otherwise hidden portions of the internet which play host to illegal and unsavoury content, including mail-order services for drugs and weapons. It also, it must be added, gives citizens of totalitarian regimes a means to bypass blacklists and access otherwise banned information sources like the BBC and Wikipedia, and a way for human rights workers and whistleblowers to communicate without fearing for their lives.Quite what TOR has to do with open source browsers, then, is unclear - but O'Donovan is adamant that something must be done. 'Perhaps the most obvious clue that O'Donovan is really talking about TOR - which is by no means a web browser, although can be downloaded with a tweaked copy of Firefox as the Tor Browser Bundle - comes in his closing paragraph: '' The closest to O'Donovan's uncited proclamation is the closure of Silk Road, a notorious TOR-based black market site, which soon recovered from the arrest of its founder and started up once again alongside numerous copycat sites.At the time of writing, O'Donovan had not responded to a request for clarification regarding his statement.