BOSTON (AP) — Long before he declared war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to turn Russia’s internet into a powerful surveillance and social control tool similar to China’s so-called Great Firewall.
When Western tech companies began cutting ties with Russia after the invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was alarmed. He had spent years exposing Russian censorship and feared that well-meaning efforts to help Ukraine would instead help Putin isolate the Russians from the free flow of information by aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.
Look guys, it’s the only place Russians have to talk about Ukraine. and what’s going on in Russia. Soldatov, now in exile in London, wrote on Facebook during the first week of the war. “You can’t just kill our access.”
Facebook didn’t, despite the Kremlin taking that stick in a short time and throttling both Facebook and Twitter so badly that it was effectively inaccessible on the Russian internet. Putin has also blocked access to both Western media and independent news sites in the country, and a new law makes it a crime to spread information that contradicts the government’s line. On Friday, the Kremlin said it would also restrict access to Instagram.
Yet the Kremlin’s latest censorship efforts have also exposed serious shortcomings in the government’s larger plans to straitjacket the internet. Any Russian with an iota of tech savvy could dodge the Kremlin’s efforts to deprive the Russians of the truth.
This puts internet bandwidth providers and related services sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight in a difficult position. On the one hand, they face public pressure to punish the Russian state and economic causes for limiting services at a time when bills may not be paid. On the other hand, they are wary of helping to curb the free flow of information that could counter Kremlin disinformation – for example, the state’s claim that the Russian army heroically “liberated” Ukraine from the fascists.
Amazon Web Services, a major cloud computing services provider, continues to operate in Russia, although it says it has not received any new customers. Both Cloudflare, which helps protect websites against denial-of-service attacks and malware, and Akamai, which improves site performance by bringing internet content closer to its target audience, continues to serve Russian customers with exceptions, including the shutdown of state-owned companies. and companies under sanctions.
Microsoft, by contrast, has not said whether it will cease cloud services in the country, although it has suspended sales of all new products and services.
US-based Cogent, which provides an important “backbone” for internet traffic, has cut direct connections within Russia but left pipes open physically on exchanges outside the country through subsidiaries of Russian network providers. Lumen, another major US backbone provider, did the same.
“We have no desire to cut off Russian individuals and think an open internet is critical to the world,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said in an interview. He said direct connections to servers inside Russia could potentially be “used by the Russian government for offensive cyber efforts.”
Schaeffer said the decision did not reflect “financial considerations,” although he acknowledged that the sharp decline in the ruble, which has made imported goods and services more expensive in Russia, could make it harder to collect customer payments. Meanwhile, he said Cogent provides free service to Ukrainian customers during the conflict.
These moves could degrade internet video in Russia, but leave plenty of bandwidth for smaller files, Schaeffer said.
Other major backbone providers in Europe and Asia also continue to serve Russia, which is a net importer of bandwidth, said Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at network management firm Kentik. He noted that there was no significant drop in connectivity from external providers.
Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers in Russia, despite Russian authorities ordering government websites to shut down foreign hosting providers from Friday. In a March 7 blog post, the company said it had determined that “Russia needs more Internet access, not less.”
Under the 2019 “sovereign internet” law, Russia is required to be able to operate its internet independently from the rest of the world. In practice, this has brought Russia closer to extensive internet surveillance and surveillance by China and Iran.
Telecommunications surveillance agency Rozkomnadzor successfully tested the system when it restricted access to Twitter a year ago. It uses hundreds of so-called router-like devices installed by law on all internet providers in Russia, operated by bureaucrats and controlled remotely, and capable of blocking individual websites and services.
But the system, which also allows the FSB security service to spy on Russian citizens, is a relative sieve compared to China’s Great Firewall. Andrew Sullivan, president of the nonprofit Internet Society, said there is no evidence it has the ability to successfully separate Russia from the wider internet.
“Turning off a country’s internet is a culturally, economically and technologically complex business. And it gets much more complicated with a country like Russia whose internet, unlike China’s, wasn’t originally created with government control in mind,” he said.
“When it comes to censorship, the only people who can really do it are the Chinese,” said Serge Droze, a senior security engineer at Switzerland-based Proton Technologies, which offers software to create “virtual private networks” or VPNs. main tool to circumvent state censorship.
ProtonVPN, which Droze says has been creative in finding ways to circumvent Russian blocking, reports ten times more logs than before the war. VPN services tracked by researchers at Top10VPN.com found that Facebook and Twitter downloads increased eight times the average. The study found that the Kremlin has blocked more than 270 news and financial sites since the invasion, including the Russian-language services of BBC News and Voice of America.
Russia’s elite is believed to be major VPN users. No one expects them to leave.
Russian authorities have also had some success in blocking the privacy-protecting Tor browser, which, like VPNs, allows users to visit content on private “.onion” sites on the dark web, the researchers say. Twitter just created a Tor site; It also exists in other publications such as The New York Times.
However, the Kremlin did not block the popular Telegram messaging app. It is a key channel for Ukrainian government ministries, as well as for Meduza, an independent Latvian-based Russian news outlet whose website has been blocked in Russia. Meduza has 1 million followers on Telegram.
Analysts say one reason may be that Telegram is a vital channel for Kremlin propagandists.
Additionally, Telegram does not have the default end-to-end encryption that makes messages unreadable by the company and outsiders, as the popular US-based messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp do. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook’s parent Meta. Telegram offers users fully encrypted “private chats”, but users need to make sure they have them enabled.
After the invasion, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike tweeted that sensitive communication in unsafe apps can be a matter of life and death in war, literally. A Signal spokesperson won’t share user numbers, but WhatsApp has an estimated 63 million users in Russia.
However, being able to access external websites and apps that are vital to stay informed depends on foreign-based VPN services, which Russians say have had a hard time paying since Visa and Mastercard cut their country.
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Ortatay reported from Oakland, California.
