Boston, March 14 (AP): Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s Internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control, similar to China’s so-called Great Firewall.
So when Western tech companies began breaking ties with Russia after its invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Solatov became concerned. He had spent years uncovering Russian censorship and feared that well-intentioned efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin to isolate Russians from the free flow of information, aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.
“Look, guys, the only place the Russians have to talk about Ukraine. And what’s happening in Russia. Facebook is,” Soldatov, now exiled in London, wrote on Facebook in the first week of the war “You can’t just like our reach.” Facebook didn’t, though the Kremlin soon picked up that baton, suppressing both Facebook and Twitter so badly that they were effectively accessible on the Russian Internet. Putin also blocked access to both Western media and independent news sites in the country, and a new law criminalizes spreading information contrary to the government’s line. On Friday, the Kremlin said it would limit access to Instagram. will also be banned.
Yet the Kremlin’s latest censorship efforts have also revealed serious shortcomings in the government’s larger plans to straighten the internet. Any Russian who has technological smarts can thwart the Kremlin’s efforts to really starve the Russians.
This places providers of Internet bandwidth and related services in a difficult position to sympathize with Ukraine’s plight. On the one hand, they face public pressure to punish the Russian state and for economic reasons, for limiting services at a time when bills may not be well paid. On the other hand, they are wary of helping to suppress a free flow of information that could counter Kremlin propaganda – for example, the state’s claim that Russia’s military is heroically “liberating” Ukraine from fascists. .
Amazon Web Services continues to operate in Russia, although it says it is not taking on any new customers. Cloudflare, which helps protect websites from denial-of-service attacks and malware, and Akamai, which enhances site performance by keeping Internet content close to their audiences, have, with exceptions, including cutting state-owned companies. Continues to serve Russian customers. And firms have been banned.
In contrast, Microsoft has not said whether it will stop its cloud services in the country, although it has suspended all new sales of products and services.
US-based Cogent, which provides a major “backbone” for Internet traffic, has cut off direct connections inside Russia, but leaving pipes open to exchanges outside the country through subsidiaries of Russian network providers. Have given. Another major US Backbone provider, Lumen, has done the same.
“We have no desire to bite Russian individuals and think that an open Internet is vital to the world,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaefer said in an interview. Direct connections to servers inside Russia, he said, could potentially be “used for aggressive cyber efforts by the Russian government.” He added that Cogent is providing free service to Ukraine customers during the conflict.
Schaefer said these moves could degrade Internet video in Russia but would leave a lot of bandwidth for smaller files.
Other major backbone providers in Europe and Asia also continue to serve Russia, a net importer of bandwidth, said Doug Madori, director of internet analysis for network management firm Kentik.
Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers in Russia, even after Russian officials ordered government websites to drop foreign-owned hosting providers by Friday. In a March 7 blog post, the company said it determined that “Russia needs more Internet access, not less.” Under the 2019 “sovereign internet” law, Russia is supposed to be able to operate its internet independent of the rest of the world. In practice, this has brought Russia closer to the intense internet surveillance and control practiced by China and Iran.
Its telecommunications monitoring agency, Rozkomnadzor, successfully tested the system a year ago when it blocked access to Twitter. It uses hundreds of so-called middleboxes – router-like devices run by bureaucrats and remotely controlled that can block individual websites and services – established by law at all Internet providers inside Russia.
But the system, which lets the FSB security service spy on Russian citizens, is a relative sieve compared to China’s Great Firewall. Andrew Sullivan, president of the non-profit Internet Society, said there is no evidence it has the ability to successfully disconnect Russia from the wider Internet.
“When it comes to censorship, only the Chinese can do that,” said Serge Droz, a senior security engineer at Swiss-based Proton Technologies, which provides software to build “virtual private networks,” or VPNs. Key tool for bypassing state censorship.
ProtonVPN, which Droz says has been inventive in finding ways to circumvent Russian interceptions, reports 10 times higher daily signups than before the war.
Russian authorities are also having some success blocking the privacy-protecting Tor browser, which, like a VPN, lets users view content on specialized “onion” sites on the so-called dark web, researchers say. Twitter just made a Tor site; He also has them in other outlets such as The New York Times.
The Kremlin, however, has not blocked the popular Telegram messaging app. (AP) IJT
(This story has been published as part of an auto-generated Syndicate wire feed. Headline or body have not been edited by ABP Live.)