Myths and realities of the “sovereign Internet” project

Catch up and overtake China. The coming change of faces in the Kremlin and the White House has been marked by old-new fears that the Russian authorities will try to control the Internet, as their Chinese, Cuban and Iranian comrades have done. The myths and realities of the Sovereign Internet project were sorted out by The New Times

As you know, at the beginning of his reign, Vladimir Putin was very fond of watching TV. As a result, the remote control of the central TV channels passed from private hands to state hands and became one of the main instruments of Russian politics. Virtual reality has successfully replaced reality and raised the ratings of Big Brother to an unattainable height. The advanced part of the population - about 16 million people - turned off this blue light and firmly settled in the global web, where so far there is everything that has not been on TV channels for a long time: information, analysis, discussion. However, as it turned out, Putin's successor, Dmitry Medvedev, also knows what exactly on the Internet you can hear, including about yourself, something that has not been heard anywhere else for a long time. Runet became agitated: in recent years, the attachments of the country's top officials to one or another media resource invariably end up with these same resources being tied to the leg of the authorities - as happened with ORT, NTV and TV-6, then everywhere ... How can be put on the chain of the Internet and is it possible? The New Times own investigation showed that taking this height is not a problem for the Kremlin, but such a project will be very expensive.

The great Wall of China

So, there is the experience and example of China - the "Great Chinese Firewall" (from the English. Firewall - "fire system"). Firewall is a special server or system of servers installed on the Internet channel between the user and the Internet connection provider (provider). This "filter" was invented in order to protect Internet citizens from viruses, spam and hackers. But it can also be successfully used to "protect" the population from information that Big Brother may consider superfluous. This is exactly what the Chinese authorities are doing, using a virtual “wall” to block access of their citizens to those sites that they should not see. Moreover, Beijing was able to quite successfully use even large international companies for this purpose. For example, in 2003, at the request of the Chinese authorities, Yahoo provided them with data about a user who, using a computer in one of the Internet cafes, transmitted information about the plight of dissidents in the Middle Kingdom to the New York branch of the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch. As a result, 32-year-old Dazhou Li Zhi received 8 years in prison, and Yahoo received a series of lawsuits from international human rights organizations. In 2007, there were reports that the "Great Firewall of China" blocked its citizens from using Yahoo, Google and Live.com search engines.

Why Runet is not Chinanet

The secret of Chinese success, however, should not be overestimated. The fact is that only two providers are allowed to work in the Celestial Empire, and both belong to the state. In Russia, according to specialized websites, there are already about 10 thousand providers operating at present. Is it possible for each of them to install such a filtering firewall for themselves? “Technically, this is possible,” says Ivan Zasursky, head of the Convergence Laboratory at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. - The authorities are starting to deal with the Internet and are trying to do something there. But it's not so much about closure or censorship. It’s about making it more clear where information comes from.” One of the founding fathers of Runet, Anton Nosik, head of the blog service at SUP, is more categorical: “Technically, everything is possible. Break - do not build, the soul does not hurt. One letter from the Ministry of Communications is enough. The question is that there are opportunities to do this, but there is not a single decision-maker who would dare to do this. We have high expectations of draconian measures, so every squeak about censorship on the Internet is taken nervously. But don't confuse the fright of the villagers with the actual behavior of the wolves." Yegor Bykovsky, editor-in-chief of the Vokrug Sveta.Ru portal, also believes that it will be extremely difficult to establish control over the Internet, no matter how much the authorities wish: “Introducing censorship in Runet is like trying to fish out pieces of oil in a huge oil pipeline that go along the walls in a certain period of time.

On the other hand, every Russian provider, whatever one may say, operates under a license from the Ministry of Communications. In the early 2000s, this ministry obliged all providers to install special equipment - the so-called SORMs. ¹ . SORM-1 is a telephone tapping system organized in 1996. SORM-2 is an Internet control system created in 2000. Theoretically, this system is capable of tracking all the billions of bytes and bits of Internet information. In practice, the system is fixated on keeping track of a specific list of words. That is, if an imyarek uses the words “terrorist attack”, “bomb”, “Kremlin explosion” or “assassination of the president” in his Internet correspondence, FSB officers may be interested in him. Unless, of course, from thousands of letters with these words, they filter out exactly this and find some kind of criminal intent in it. Despite the fact that the SORM technique has been on the servers of providers since the early 2000s, not a single case of a criminal being caught thanks to this system has yet been known. So, if the Kremlin, the FSB or the Ministry of Communications decide to start building the “Great Russian Firewall”, providers will not become a hindrance to them. Fortunately, Russian techies have some experience: most large companies have local "walls" that do not allow employees to use Internet chats, forums, blogs or social networks.

Technical antidote

What, then, can stand in the way of the censors? The easiest way is anonymizers. If Russia had initially followed the Chinese path, their appearance would have been impossible. But now they are, and there is nothing to be done about it. What is an anonymizer? Grossly simplifying, it is a computer program, or a specialized site on the Internet, that allows the user to completely encrypt their movements.

It is with the help of such programs that the managers of most Moscow offices circumvent the prohibitions of their technical directors on visiting various blogs, forums and dating sites, continuing to destroy government traffic. “In each case, by using proxy servers and other methods, filtering can be bypassed, but the mass audience will be cut off,” says Sergey Gorshkov, creator and owner of the Kompromat.Ru website. Recently, Gorshkov himself encountered a similar problem: several providers blocked users from accessing his site. After the information got into the media, some providers removed the blocking. However, not everyone is so optimistic. “Of course, you can bypass filtering if you use an encrypted traffic transfer protocol (that is, those very anonymizers,” says Shagen Ogandzhanyan, a technical specialist at SUP. “But you need to understand that if the state decides to completely close the Runet from the outside world, this will not help. If the state sets such a task - to control providers and each user, then identifying such “hackers” who use anonymizers is only a matter of time.” In this way, advanced users in China and Iran can, for example, read the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is banned in these countries. But, of course, we are talking about cases where the state selectively blocks foreign Internet resources. If someone decides to repeat the experience of North Korea, which has a single site with pages in all languages ​​for the outside world, and absolutely all foreign sites are prohibited for the inhabitants of the country, then no anonymizers will help. A similar situation is in Cuba: there, by law, access to the Internet is prohibited for everyone except doctors.

Desert island RU

It is theoretically possible to cut off the Runet completely from the outside world. As Europe and the United States are connected by a transatlantic cable, so Russia is connected to the rest of the world by the same cables laid across the borders with Poland, Finland, and the Baltic countries. There are such cables in the Far East. But, of course, no one can guarantee that at some point the state will not decide to cut them all.

However, it is not necessary to cut off the Runet completely from the outside world. All experts interviewed by The New Times agree on one thing: the main task of any draconian measures against the Internet is to cut off the general public from “harmful” information. As the experience of the same Russian television shows, those who wish can watch the relatively free news of the REN TV channel, but their rating is ten times lower than Channel One, and the coverage of REN TV is not comparable to state channels. There are also similar examples on the Internet. When the Kremlin ideologists decided to fight the independent Internet media, they simply created several of their own major publications, investing millions of dollars in their promotion. The result was instantaneous: independent online publications lost their audience dramatically. So those who need and are interested will find the information one way or another anyway. Whether there will be a "Great Russian Firewall" or not, the majority of non-political citizens will dutifully read the news from the kremlin.ru website, as they now watch the evening broadcasts of Channel One.

On February 15, 2007, 22-year-old Syktyvkar blogger and rock band musician Savva Terentyev left a harsh comment in one of his blogs, in which he expressed the wish that one “incorrect cop” be burned daily on the main square of Russian cities to cleanse society from “Cop-Gopot dirt” ". The result of this comment was a search, the seizure of a personal computer, the filing of charges under Art. 282 part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Inciting hatred or enmity, as well as the humiliation of human dignity" and a written undertaking not to leave. This case was the first in Russia, which was initiated for a comment in an online diary. On March 12, the case of Savva Terentyev was brought to court.

On April 19, 2007, philosophy teacher and journalist Kirill Martynov published an entry in his Internet diary in which he said that his wife was arrested on charges of “attempting to kill her daughter” and that the accusation was based on the testimony of an 11-year-old neighbor boy. Links to this entry appeared in many Internet diaries and the case quickly gained wide publicity: it was covered by federal television channels, print and online media, and members of the Public Chamber took an active part in it. As a result of such a wide resonance, the prosecutor's office had to change the preventive measure for Antonina Martynova, to change the investigator. And on February 22 of this year, a criminal case was initiated against Kirill Martynov under Art. 310 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Disclosure of preliminary investigation data". On March 5, Kirill Martynov filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, in which he questioned the constitutionality of the current version of Article 310 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

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1 The system of operational-search measures.