With Coercion and Black Boxes, Russia Installs a Digital Iron Curtain 52
Russia's boldest moves to censor the internet began in the most mundane of ways -- with a series of bureaucratic emails and forms. From a report: The messages, sent by Russia's powerful internet regulator, demanded technical details -- like traffic numbers, equipment specifications and connection speeds -- from companies that provide internet and telecommunications services across the country. Then the black boxes arrived. The telecom companies had no choice but to step aside as government-approved technicians installed the equipment alongside their own computer systems and servers. Sometimes caged behind lock and key, the new gear linked back to a command center in Moscow, giving authorities startling new powers to block, filter and slow down websites that they did not want the Russian public to see.
The process, underway since 2019, represents the start of perhaps the world's most ambitious digital censorship effort outside of China. Under President Vladimir V. Putin, who once called the internet a "C.I.A. project" and views the web as a threat to his power, the Russian government is attempting to bring the countryâ(TM)s once open and freewheeling internet to heel. The gear has been tucked inside the equipment rooms of Russia's largest telecom and internet service providers, including Rostelecom, MTS, MegaFon and Vympelcom, a senior Russian lawmaker revealed this year. It affects the vast majority of the country's more than 120 million wireless and home internet users, according to researchers and activists. The world got its first glimpse of Russia's new tools in action when Twitter was slowed to a crawl in the country this spring. It was the first time the filtering system had been put to work, researchers and activists said. Other sites have since been blocked, including several linked to the jailed opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny.
The process, underway since 2019, represents the start of perhaps the world's most ambitious digital censorship effort outside of China. Under President Vladimir V. Putin, who once called the internet a "C.I.A. project" and views the web as a threat to his power, the Russian government is attempting to bring the countryâ(TM)s once open and freewheeling internet to heel. The gear has been tucked inside the equipment rooms of Russia's largest telecom and internet service providers, including Rostelecom, MTS, MegaFon and Vympelcom, a senior Russian lawmaker revealed this year. It affects the vast majority of the country's more than 120 million wireless and home internet users, according to researchers and activists. The world got its first glimpse of Russia's new tools in action when Twitter was slowed to a crawl in the country this spring. It was the first time the filtering system had been put to work, researchers and activists said. Other sites have since been blocked, including several linked to the jailed opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny.
Can they be DDoS-ed? (Score:3, Interesting)
I imagine some hefty DDoS could bring these boxes down, then the Internet-deprived Russians would riot.
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Nah, they'll just buy VPNs from China [slashdot.org].
Re:Would never happen in the US! (Score:4, Funny)
All the while leaving the pesky "First Amendment" question aside: Hey, government's not blocking you â" Facebook is blocking you!
Yes comrade! We must seize the means of facebook, for the people.
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Absolutely, comrade. We can only solve this by a glorious people's revolution. Capitalism is dead.
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Well, your own Communist sympathies are well known, and betray not only your homicidal tendencies, but your stupidity. The death of Capitalism will not only devastate us all — yourself included — economically, Communism is also the most murderous school of thought known to humanity [reason.com]. That is, you'll be lucky, if your children are allowed to live [wikipedia.org] after you are taken away "without the right of correspondence" [wikipedia.org] as an "enemy of the people" [wikipedia.org].
And, no, there is no "third option"... It is
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Well, your own Communist sympathies are well known,
You're the private property hating communist, not I.
Since you're too dense to understand, I shall explain: I was using sarcasm.
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Neah, you were trolling me. Poe's Law [wikipedia.org] aside, I happen to remember your true convictions from past conversations.
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I happen to remember your true convictions
Well, you remember whatever you made up last time, that's for sure. I'm going to have a fun evening watching you do backflips as you keep making claims about me but refuse to provide evidence.
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Re:Would never happen in the US! (Score:4)
Yes, facebook is blocking you. Government isn't.
Government is just threatening them with hundreds of billions of dollars of stock value loss by wiping section 230 if they don't block you.
First Amendment is saved! What a clever workaround!
It's the thought that counts, and the spirit of politicians is in the right place: using the power of government to censor!
Re:Would never happen in the US! (Score:5, Insightful)
The big difference between a national firewall (like Russia and China) and your scenario, is that Facebook doesn't even have the capacity to block you. Even if Facebook and the government were to deliberately work together in order to fuck you over, and by any illegal means available to Facebook, it still wouldn't be enough. You'd just post to one of the other million websites instead, or host your own and make it a million and one. With a national firewall, you wouldn't be able to so trivially go around them. Without a national firewall, you go around Facebook all the time without even thinking about it (e.g. you posted to Slashdot).
As long as we keep Internet access open (and hopefully as competitive as possible), whatever decisions (whether stupid or malicious) on the part of particular sites doesn't really matter. If they become an ISP, though, and then become peoples' only choice of ISP, watch out.
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Yes, look what happened: 1) The New York Post was completely unaffected and remained up, 100% free from any external interference by anyone. 2) Twitter stopped publishing content linking to one of the New York Post's stories. In other words, basically nothing happened. A molehill was made out of spec of dirt.
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Where do I Subscribe? (Score:2)
How do I get my servers on this list?
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LOL. Yes, block me please too. I'll be so sad when all these griefing fuckwits are kept of my game servers without me having to ban them individually by hand.
Shine some RF on them... (Score:3)
I'd get a big coil from an Induction AC motor and put it right next to the box so it floods RF into their equipment.
We need some details about this equipment. Brands/Chips/Footprint/Weight/Power Consumption...
Would love to work on countermeasures...
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I do not really understand your point. If you had physical access you could also disable it with a baseball bat or your foot. Then you would be sent prison.
There are easier ways to get sent to prison in Russia -- just declare yourself a candidate for President.
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I'd get a big coil from an Induction AC motor and put it right next to the box
No way would the telecoms let unauthorized people into their facility, let alone near colocated gear.
It's a quick way to end up sent in Petak Island; the Russian penal system is among most aggressive ones with .prisons which are notoriously brutal
Black boxes (Score:2)
Black boxes are not just a Russian thing.
Horrible formatting in the original article... (Score:2)
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I am not sure what site you visited. Maybe a Russian black box. nytimes.com uses large black Times Roman on a white background.
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back to the samizdat (Score:2)
Master's Control can't see multifolded little wads of paper
How long will this be effective? (Score:3)
What happens when satellite-based internet data transceivers become readily available on the black market? These could be installed just about anyplace as satellite-to-WiFi bridges, perhaps powered by the sun so it's difficult or impossible to determine who put set them up. I suppose the government could simply jam those frequencies - but that's a LOT of jamming to do, and it would likely interfere with other comms as well.
The internet was designed to route around damage, and the growing reach and variety of its physical infrastructure is making that feature harder and harder to defeat. The Russian government's actions will put a damper on online dissent for a while, but I don't think this is going to be as effective as they'd like it to be in the long term.
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What happens when satellite-based internet data transceivers become readily available on the black market?
Current satellite networks operate with local ground stations, so the state sponsored infrastructure just needs to be installed at the local ground stations to monitor and intercept the traffic.
Let the Free Market decide (Score:3)
I sense a new market for a stealth version of SpaceX Starlink base stations. Of course it will become a 20-to-life sentence to own one but that will be the only way I can think of around this.
And not just Russia. China, Saudi Arabia, and whomever is funding spies in North Korea.
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you're funny, suggesting a U.S. corporation's product would be any solution to internet privacy or censorship. Impossible to have "stealth version" anyway, it emits RF... and for now needs base station within 500 miles
so crank up the brain drain (Score:5, Interesting)
Putin represents a fantastic opportunity for western nations.
I work with Russians at a tech company. They are awesome. By the way, so are the Indians, Japanese, Taiwanese and Americans and Africans there, but the difference is that Russians are an especially good hiring opportunity because the increasingly oppressive Russian oligarchy makes living in Russia an increasingly worse proposition. Russia has a 3rd world economy and a first-world education system, it is designed for foreign tech companies to harvest employees from there. If the U.S. was not run by idiots, then we would to accelerate U.S. tech growth by promoting immigration of skilled Russians to the U.S. Just give an unlimited number of green cards to those with jobs offers and tech degrees or skills. Stand back and watch the U.S. tech sector boom.
That would use Putin's own policies to undermine him. Hard to run a country when your most competent people head for the exits. That is the reason to target specifically educated and skilled Russians with green cards. That policy undermines their leadership and we really do not want to be undermining Japan, Taiwan, Africa, etc. by taking their best and brightest at especially high rates.
For Trumpists proclaiming, "Thems darned four-unners is comin here steelin' usses joobs": No, that is not the way it works. Tech growth his highly constrained by a limited supply of advanced R&D. Every genius a tech company hires creates many more jobs manufacturing what he engineers. Also, there is not a fixed number of jobs. It's not like for every new person who becomes employed, it's necessary to fire someone else.
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Anything can be hacked (Score:3)
It sounds to me like Russia just installed a whole bunch of powerful boxes designed, maintained, and updated by underpaid, unmotivated, unappreciated government employees.
The argument for not building in a back door applies pretty much everywhere. How long before these are hacked?
Time to cut Putin off from the world (Score:1)
Who delivered ... (Score:2)
It's Russia. (Score:1)
U.S. one of the most (Score:1)