Potemkin cyber villages

New plots of the conflict between Russia and advanced technologies

News worth paying attention to in the context of the growing conflict over new technologies in Russia: a change in Telegram's privacy policy. At the beginning of the fight against Roskomnadzor, Pavel Durov stated that not a single byte of information from messenger users would be transferred to any government in the world. Now the rules of the game are changing: the new version of the rules for using Telegram states that the messenger can transfer user identification information (IP addresses and phone number) at the request of the authorities if there is an official court order and accusation of a particular user of terrorism.

At first glance, this may seem like an attempt by Telegram to return to the legal field, to achieve deblocking in Russia at the expense of a serious concession to Roskomnadzor and the FSB. However, this is most likely not the case. The claim to Telegram from the FSB concerned the transfer of the famous "encryption keys" - that is, the amount of information, much more than identification data, in fact, access to the entire correspondence of users.

Telegram representatives did not say anything about their readiness to transfer such data to a third party, on the contrary, the position of the messenger's lawyers is that the transfer of keys is impossible.

Accordingly, the unblocking of Telegram should not be expected, as well as the too willing cooperation of the messenger with the Russian authorities.

The change in privacy policy is associated with completely different circumstances: the emergence in Europe of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires Internet services to strictly regulate any manipulation of user information. Telegram does not want to be friends with the FSB, representatives of the messenger strive to work legally in the European Union. The scandal that broke out in this regard in our country shows that our public does not quite correctly assess the importance of the Russian market for large IT projects. It seems to us that we live in the center of the world, but in reality, the same Durov has enough more promising areas for development. The creator of Telegram tried to hint at this when he said that the changes in the rules of the messenger were not related to the Russian situation, but it seems that he was not heard.

So the users who accused Telegram of succumbing to pressure from the security services are not right.

Another thing is that Durov's libertarian fantasy of a messenger, completely independent of all the governments of the world, is starting to collapse.

In the real world, Telegram, like all other Internet services, will have to compromise with the largest political structures in the world. Sharing user identities by court order is normal practice for Facebook or Google. An obligatory part of this practice is public reports on all requests from the authorities. Telegram will also publish similar reports. To date, no requests have been received from the Russian authorities to disclose identification information. In any case, it turns out that the problem is not so much in Telegram, but in the quality of Russian courts. And Durov will not have to solve this problem.

At the same time, in the near future, officials fighting with Telegram in Russia may significantly increase their headaches. The future monetization of the project, as you know, is associated with the development of its own payment system based on the messenger, built on cryptocurrency. A few days ago, it became known that by the end of the year Rosfinmonitoring plans to acquire its own software package for tracking operations in bitcoins - as part of the Unified Information System. The corresponding order for 19.5 million rubles was placed on the public procurement website, and the Moscow Institute for Security Problems and Information Analysis will become its executor. Rosfinmonitoring's initiative looks no less futuristic than the message that appeared in early August that Starbucks intends to experiment with bitcoin as a means of payment in its coffee shops.

However, there are noticeably more questions about this initiative of officials than answers.

• On what grounds is Rosfinmonitoring going to monitor manipulations with cryptocurrency, the legal status of which in Russia has not yet been determined?

• Which of the many cryptocurrencies will be chosen for monitoring and what will happen to those that are not included in the list?

• What will happen if Telegram, blocked in Russia and thus, by definition, ousted to the black market, starts developing its own cryptocurrency?

• Finally, the main question is related to the extent to which the idea of ​​such centralized monitoring of numerous distributed and (semi) anonymous financial systems is viable in principle. And will it not turn out that the Institute for Security Problems will present to officials only a suitable Potemkin village?

The construction of such Potemkin villages in the no man's land between the state and IT has reached incredible proportions. The most striking example is, perhaps, the “Yarovaya package”, which is obviously unfeasible even in its current lightweight form. The largest providers, including Rostelecom and Megafon, are looking for a way to comply with the requirement of a six-month storage of all user traffic at someone else's expense. The genius idea here is to abolish the classic Internet principle of net neutrality, according to which providers have no right to restrict one type of traffic for the sake of another.

If providers can legally reduce the speed of access for international services such as Facebook and Google, then they will be able to demand compensation from the latter for bringing access to the norm. If this multipath is implemented, then Russian providers and officials will remain in the black: either international services will be inaccessible on the territory of Russia, or these services will pay for the purchase of data centers for the Yarovaya package. The losers, as usual, will be users.