Russia 'tried to cut off' World Wide Web
Russia 'tried to cut off' World Wide Web
A failed experiment to cut Russia from the World Wide Web
stokes fears of Chinese-style online censorship
The objective was to see whether the Runet – the informal
name for the Russian internet – could continue to function in isolation from
the global internet.
By Roland Oliphant, Moscow 6:15PM BST 15 Oct 2015
Russia has run large scale experiments to test the
feasibility of cutting the country off the World Wide Web, a senior industry
executive has claimed.
The tests, which come amid mounting concern about a Kremlin
campaign to clamp down on internet freedoms, have been described by experts as
preparations for an information blackout in the event of a domestic political
crisis.
Andrei Semerikov, general director of a Russian service
provider called Er Telecom, said Russia’s ministry of communications and
Roskomnadzor, the national internet regulator, ordered communications hubs run
by the main Russian internet providers to block traffic to foreign
communications channels by using a traffic control system called DPI.
The objective was to see whether the Runet – the informal
name for the Russian internet – could continue to function in isolation from
the global internet.
The experiment, which took place in spring this year,
failed because thousands of smaller service providers, which Roskomnadzor has
little control over, continued to pass information out of the country, Mr
Semerikov said.
Smaller providers account for over 50 per cent of the
market in some Russian regions, generally lack the DPI technology used by the larger
companies to implement the blocking orders, and often use satellite connections
that cannot be easily blocked.
Russian officials denied any such experiment had taken
place. A Roskomnadzor spokesman said “there was not such experiment". The
agency had not responded to a written request for further details by close of
business Thursday.
Mr Semerikov’s comments had been wrongly interpreted and
“in such a form that it is pointless to comment on it,” another Roskomnadzor
spokesman told RBK, a Russian newspaper.
But the reported Spring experiment follows a similar test
in July last year, when security agencies including the FSB, the defence
ministry, and the interior ministry collaborated with the national telephone
operator to see if a national intranet made up of the domain names ending in
.ru or. рф could continue to operate if cut off from other parts of the
Internet.
That test was reportedly ordered personally by Vladimir
Putin, the Russian president, to assess the Russian internet’s ability to
continue operating if Western countries introduce sanctions cutting off the
country from the internet, and resulted in a decision to build backup
infrastructure to ensure the Runet's continued operation.
Sanctions that prevent Western companies from doing
business in Crimea, the province of Ukraine annexed by Russia in 2014, have
made some internet services unavailable there.
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services
and the co-author of a new book about the Kremlin’s internet security policy
and eavesdropping practices, called that a “pretext".
In reality, said Mr Soldatov, officials are readying for
the possibility of shutting down the information flow to and from the outside
world in case of a domestic political emergency.
“This is actually just one of a series of such
experiments, and it gives us a very good idea of what they have in mind. If you
look at the doctrine of information security, it is all about the same thing:
the fear of Western countries using the internet as an instrument of influence
in Russia and so on,” he said.
Mr Soldatov said the failure of the spring experiment
proved that the authorities were unlikely to succeed in imposing such an
information blackout.
“You technically can’t impose a Chinese model of
censorship on an internet system which, like Russia’s, has grown for 20 years
as an almost entirely uncontrolled, free space,” he said.
Russia has introduced a number of restrictive internet
laws in recent years, in what some have described as an effort to impose
“digital sovereignty” on cyber space.
Legislation to date includes blacklisting of websites
deemed “extremist” or harmful to children, making bloggers with more than 3,000
daily readers subject to the same restrictions and regulation as newspapers and
television, and requiring internet companies to move all servers containing
data on Russia citizens to Russia.
Critics said the extremism and child protection laws are
so loosely worded they can be applied arbitrarily. Sites banned under the
extremism law include the website of Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and
Kremlin critic, grani.ru, an opposition news website, and the blog of Alexey
Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and vociferous critic of Mr Putin.
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