Moscow began blocking a number of VPNs this summer, including Apple’s analogue service. As has already happened in China, Egypt, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile Gazprom acquires VKontakte, the first social network. Soldatov’s prediction: “I think Youtube is also six months old in Russia”
Moscow’s strategic choice – blocking Tor, an acronym for “The Onion Router”, the encryption software that allows users to surf the Internet anonymously and overcome restrictions set by authoritarian states or dictatorships – had gone completely unnoticed. Roskomnadzor, the authority that oversees telecommunications and the web in Russia, had written three enigmatic lines, but which, reread, now seem clear. The text, with the bureaucratic obscurity typical of censors, spoke of the“Introduction of centralized management in relation to the means to circumvent the restriction of information prohibited by law”. Obviously no one had understood much, on the spot, but what he was talking about: blocking Tor.
The news is now officially confirmed by the Tor Project itself. Tor was blocked in Russia. Tor is a system that was first used in the American intelligence sphere in the mid-1990s, but was developed in research fields. In 1996, David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson of the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) wondered if there was a way to make Internet connections that would not reveal who was talking to whom, even if there was someone capable of check the network. Tor was born there, to guarantee anonymized communications, then in the 2000s the code was made public, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation started financing developers all over the world, giving birth to the Tor project, which it made available everywhere, on the basis of a maximum democratic participation, the system. Of course Tor has been heavily used in all places where censorship is strong, and always at risk of attacks from tyrannical states. But now Moscow says enough. Russia began blocking a series of VPNs this summer – private networks that allow you to bypass a series of blocks on unwelcome sites – including that of the Opera browser, one of the most used. Then Roskomnadzor forced Apple (with a ruling) to shut down its Private Relay encryption service. In order to understand each other, Apple had already been forced to close it in China, Egypt, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. The crème de la crème of democracies around the world.
Tor has more than three hundred thousand users in Russia, or 14 percent of all daily users, second only to the United States. The Tor Project responded to Vladimir Putin’s move by inviting his users to get around the block by visiting his mirror site, which still worked. “Blocking Tor would be practically impossible. It is a large community that will find the means to finance the organization of the blockade in Russia, ”Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Defense Society, a non-profit fighting against online censorship in Russia, told Reuters. But one of the leading internet experts in Russia, Andrei Soldatov, the author of the book with Irina Borogan The Red Web, it seems more pessimistic to the Moscow Times: “Tor has seemed unbeatable for years, even in Russia. Moscow unsuccessfully challenged it in 2014, two years after the introduction of internet censorship in the country. The Russian interior ministry then offered 3.9 million rubles ($ 86,000) for TOR cracking research, but was forced to cancel the project due to lack of progress. Then things changed: «The dictators have found a way to block it, also using the technology developed in the democracies. Deep Packet Inspection it was initially developed for commercial use, but many authoritarian countries use it in their censorship and surveillance systems, including the Russian Sovereign Internet. ‘
The Tor Project on its blog responds to Russia with a call for resistance, and a series of tips on how to resist: “We will need many more bridges to keep the Russians online. Thanks to the researchers, we learned that the default bridges available in Tor Browser don’t work in some places in Russia, including “Snowflake” and “obfs4”. Russian users must follow our guide to use bridges that are not blocked ». And they also call translators from Russian, as well as developers, to collaborate in the open source spirit. But this time the attack launched by the Kremlin is much heavier, because it concerns a whole series of Kremlin policies for the web that go in one direction, let’s call it, “Chinese”. For example, many observers look with great concern at the very recent acquisition of VKontakte, the historic Russian social network, by Gazprom, the state energy company. What will it mean in the medium term? VKontakte, founded by Pavel Durov, had already passed into friendly hands of the Kremlin, those of the oligarch Alisher Usmanov (assiduous presence in Italy, by the way). Does your entry into the Gazprom sphere now definitively mark the will of the state to also control social media? Soldatov al Financial Times he just made a grim prediction: “I think Youtube is six months old in Russia too.”
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