Autumn attack on the Internet

Officials defeated in the battle for Telegram are preparing a counterattack

In recent months, the front of the war for freedom of speech on the Web has stabilized. Officials pretend that they successfully block Telegram, which remains one of the largest messengers in the market. Work on blocking does not subside for a single day: a list of IP addresses used by Telegram is constantly being specified. If at the time of the exacerbation of the fighting, Roskomnadzor blocked more than 10 million IP, now they are a little more than 3 million, most of which belong to Amazon services. All these body movements of officials eventually turned out to be absolutely meaningless, since Telegram is available to all Russian users without any tricks, in normal mode. But no one will blame Roskomnadzor of inaction or, worse, sabotage of state interests. Look at the dynamics of blocked addresses since April: this is the legendary Sisyphus Labor.

Roskomnadzor does not lose heart at all and even takes on additional obligations. Russian providers report, for example, that they received official claims from the department due to the fact that support services use the blocked Telegram as a channel for convenient communication with users. There is some kind of incident, since there is no punishment for using blocked services in Russia. There is no need to clarify that representatives of the industry and these claims themselves are discussing in chats and channels in Telegram.

The lawyers of the messenger, meanwhile, pass all the authorities of national legislation in the struggle for the release. On August 9, the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court rejected the complaint “Agora”, representing the interests of Telegram, to the actions of the FSB. Lawyer Ramil Akhmatgaliev insisted that the demand for the messenger to transfer the “encryption keys” by special services is illegal, does not provide the interests of Russian citizens and contradicts the secret of correspondence guaranteed by the 23rd of the Constitution. The representative of the FSB, in turn, claimed that the agency did not require deciphering the entire correspondence, but insisted on access to the data of specific users. It is clear that in this case it was a question of creating a precedent: private cooperation of Telegram with special services would jeopardize all users of the messenger.

Trying to sue the Russian authorities and a business that suffered from massive locks of the IP addresses of third services during the hunting for Telegram. LLC “Living Photography” filed a lawsuit against Roskomnadzor and Prosecutor General because the organization’s website was blocked without legal grounds. The Prosecutor General’s Office hastened to disown the actions of Roskomnadzor: in her official answer it was reported that the agency did not provide sanctions to block millions of IP addresses and that it was only about blocking seven accounts in Telegram, as well as four services for disinfecting locks. Roskomnadzor, as follows from this answer, acted on his own, not having obvious powers for this.

The political meaning of this gesture of the Prosecutor General’s Office is easy: no one wants to bear responsibility for the failure of the state mission to block a rebellious messenger.

Telgram followed the path of popular pirate resources, such as Rutracker and Flibusta. They were "forever blocked" in Russia several years ago, but continue to develop outside Russian jurisdiction. For business, Pavel Durov, as we have already noted, independence from the Russian authorities is one of the key factors in high capitalization. The conflict with the FSB is useful for Telegram in international markets, as it removes suspicions from the company in connection with its Russian roots.

At the same time, the risks-image and economic-for IT business, working in Russian jurisdiction, continue to grow. A wave of criminal cases for pictures, likes and the recovery of VKontakte materials forced the owners of the site Mail.ru Group to worry about user safety. While representatives of the company have proposed to remove information about likes from public access or to even make information about their profile non -public.

Experts criticize these measures and note that they are unlikely to solve the problem: all users will not hide their profiles, which means that the operatives hunting for the “extremists” will still remain scope. In world practice, the issue of interaction between Internet services with needs of special services is decided differently: all major social networks publish information about the requests of the authorities for users, and Facebook also informs specific users about what they were interested in.

Against the backdrop of a strange war for Telegram, news, which in a different setting would hardly go beyond industry publications, attract the attention of the public. So, for example, the history of the purchase by the Investigative Committee of two IDC-8811 Forensic Magicube in China-for 5 million rubles each, received a resonance. "Magic Cubes" are designed to extract data from smartphones and computers.

There are several companies in the world specializing in the development of such special equipment. Until recently, Russian officials preferred to cooperate in this matter with Israeli developers. By the way, the FBI works with them. So, after a terrorist attack in the California San Bernardino in December 2015, it was the Israelis who hacked the IPhone of the terrorist, who remained at the crime scene, after Apple’s refusal to cooperate with the American authorities in the interests of protecting conscientious users and their private information. The choice of the Chinese supplier of special equipment is obviously connected with the foreign policy situation. Now, data from the densifier device can go not only to the Investigative Committee, but also to Beijing (but at least not in Tel Aviv).

The news about the purchase of “Cubes” attracted the attention of the Internet audience due to the recent dispute about what the special services on the Internet can and could not. This, for example, includes rumors refuted by the company that WhatsApp began to cooperate with special services. In the eyes of those who believe in the omnipotence of the FSB and their colleagues, the tender for the supply of special equipment has become another evidence: they say, they have tools to read everything, the question is only in desire. In reality, everything is arranged somewhat more complicated.

Chinese "magic cubes", firstly, are not designed to intercept information online: in order to extract data from the phone, they need to be connected physically to this phone. Secondly, although Cubs, which represent a bunch of powerful specialized computers and special software, can really quickly unlock phones and extract information about user correspondence from popular messengers and data on social networks, this is possible only if the user has not concerned about additional encryption measures. So, getting data from a smartphone that uses cryptographic protection will be more difficult even in the presence of physical access to it.

And the so-called secret chats in Telegram, subject to users of all precautions, will still be inaccessible: they are not stored on the device in an unprotected form.

Nevertheless, the share of truth in the words of those who believe in our special services is still. The results of a strange war for Telegram were not arranged among officials, and, most likely, in the fall the state will again go on the attack. The content system created over the years was discredited. This means that from the offended security forces it is worthwhile to wait for money to create a full -fledged system for filtering traffic, as well as new legislative prohibitions in relation to the Internet. So far, to the full control of the network, Russian officials are far away, but now they are well motivated by Telegram resistance and sabotage of state measures from citizens. Seriously will help Comrade Major in solving this problem “Spring Package”, the phased introduction of which will ruin small providers and lead to the fact that the Internet infrastructure will be controlled by several large companies.

Alarmist rumors about new censorship plans are walking around the market. The fact that the state relies on the national filtering of Internet traffic is also reflected in some software documents. Users should prepare for this and still tighten computer literacy. Those who want to have access to information, of course.