Block me completely

The goals of the censors are becoming more and more irrational

Senator Andrei Klishas, ​​who previously gave us the “sovereign Internet”, submitted to the State Duma a bill to block users of instant messengers (read Telegram) and mail services (for example, Protonmail) that distribute information prohibited in Russia. The specific technological implementation of the bill remains vague, and most likely the senator did not even try to delve into such details. More important is the general pathos of the document, in the explanatory note to which it is said that "in practice it is advisable to block the user entirely."

The image of the Internet, which Klishas and his associates in the security services are striving for, is becoming more and more clear. This is a place where only information approved by the authorities exists, user data, including personal correspondence, is available to any security official without a court order, all those who disagree with this state of affairs are “completely blocked”, and in extreme cases, the Internet is generally turned off from the inside in manual mode.

If earlier it was not customary to speak directly about censorship, now the Russian authorities, concerned about their own future, have ceased to be shy.

An unprecedented experiment has begun in Russia to create a controversial and hastily done system for manually managing content on the Web, and now it seems that it is not a direct analogue of the Chinese firewall or other existing system for monitoring digital content. We went our own way, creating indiscriminate bans, the main purpose of which is to give the authorities the illusion of control over the situation.

Klishas's bill is stupid, because it does not provide methods for identifying unreliable users, separating them from the patriotic public that does not use Telegram. The detection problem means that in order to comply with the law, providers and technicians will have to block anyone, just to have something to report to their superiors. So if one morning you find that you have been “completely blocked” and there is no Internet, you should know that this is nothing more than state expediency, and you will have to be patient. Despite the obvious absurdity of Senator Klishas' techno-fantasies, the bill can be adopted, because all previous digital initiatives of the same composition of participants, including also Senator Lyudmila Bokova, were fully understood by the State Duma.

Under the guise of “user blocking”, the bill extends the concept of “messaging service organizers” to e-mail, and also introduces an amendment to the Code of Administrative Offenses on the responsibility of such services for non-compliance with Russian law, that is, for refusing to clean up “forbidden information” and provide user data to special services. At first glance, this looks like an attack on the Swiss Protonmail, which the Russian security forces really dislike because they cannot read it (which looks like a great advertisement for the service). But in a broader sense, the bill prepares new leverage on Google, which simultaneously owns the most popular foreign mail service in Russia, Gmail, and YouTube video hosting, which competes in popularity with federal TV.

Three weeks are left before the entry into force of the law on the "sovereign Internet", after which all national traffic, at least on paper, will be controlled by a special government center. Based on the experience of Roskomnadzor's struggle with Telegram, one can judge that in the process of nationalizing the Network, something will definitely go wrong and fall off. And one can only hope that this optimization of the working system by the state will not affect vital things like the financial system.

The head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, simultaneously reported that new devices based on DPI technology (Deep Packet Inspection - deep analysis of data packets) appear in his department, which will allow literally within a year to complete the task set by the party and accurately block the hated Telegram. For comparison:

a year ago, after the first months of this great battle, the same Zharov reasoned that Telegram services are “mostly oppressed”, so that almost no one uses it.

Most of all, in all these dances of officials with technology, perhaps, their complete irresponsibility, their readiness to clearly harm even state goals in order to comply with abstract rules, is striking. It is obvious that by burying Russian telecom they will not do anything useful, but will only turn people against themselves. Some pragmatic task of censorship could be to implement the Chinese scenario, when in theory everyone can go to banned sites, but in fact almost no one needs this, because there are enough Chinese ones and they work well. Our censors are going in a fundamentally different way: for the sake of state greatness, they break the Internet and raise oppositionists.