Russia Will Test Its Ability to Disconnect from the Internet
Russia Will Test Its Ability
to Disconnect from the Internet
The
nascent RuNet is meant to allow the country to survive an attack — and Putin to
monitor and control the population.
Russia will test its internal
RuNet network to see whether the country can function
without the global internet, the Russian government announced Monday. The tests
will begin after Nov. 1, recur at least annually, and possibly more frequently.
It’s the latest move in a series of technical and policy steps intended to
allow the Russian government to cut its citizens off from the rest of
the world.
“On Monday, the government approved the provision on conducting
exercises to ensure the stable, safe and holistic functioning of the Internet
and public communications networks in the Russian Federation,” notes an article
in D-Russia. (The original article is in
Russian. We verified a translation with the help of a native Russian speaker.)
“The exercises are held at the federal (in the territory of the Russian
Federation) and regional (in the territory of one or more constituent entities
of the Russian Federation) levels.”
The word “holistic” shows that the exercises follow April’s
passage of the sovereign internet law that will
require all internet traffic in Russia to pass through official chokepoints,
allowing the government to shut down outside access, block websites that they don’t like, and
monitor traffic.
In 2016, Russia launched the Closed Data Transfer Segment:
basically, a big military intranet for classified data, similar to the
Pentagon’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.
The following year,
Russia announced that it intends to build
its own domain name directory, which would allow it to re-route traffic
intended for one website to another. And last year,
Putin’s top IT advisor Herman Klimenko and others suggested
that the military intranet, properly expanded, might be able to carry the
rest of the country’s internet traffic. Klimenko cautioned that moving to the
new system would be painful — and as recently as March, Gen. Paul Nakasone,
director of U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, expressed skepticism that Russia
would succeed.
Samuel Bendett, an adviser at the CNA Corporation
and a fellow in Russia studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the
announcement shows that the Russian government is eager to address what it sees as
a strategic vulnerability: reliance on Western IT.
“The larger context is Russia’s dependence as a nation on imported/foreign
hi-tech and the perceived vulnerabilities that Russia sees in such technology
use. With so many government, public, and private-sector nodes using such
foreign tech, the Russian government is seeking to impose a measure of control
over how Internet communication over this technology is conducted,” Bendett
said. “In the event of what the government sees as outside influence affecting
RuNet, the state can act — hence the annual exercise.”
RuNet isn’t expected to improve the online experience for
Russian people or companies. It’s all about control, making the country more
technologically independent, and reducing the Putin regime’s vulnerability to
popular uprising.
“The Russian government, particularly since seeing the role
social media played in the Arab Spring, has wanted over the last decade to
exert tight control over the online information space within Russia’s borders,”
said Justin Sherman, a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America who studies
internet governance and digital authoritarianism. “Free information flows are a
threat to regime stability, and they need to be controlled, the
narrative goes.”
As the Russian government has built infrastructure that can
disconnect Russia from the global internet, it has also worked to limit Russian
citizens’ access to sites and services that allow citizens to mobilize and
protest. Access to services such as LinkedIn, Zello, and Telegram is limited by
a 2006 Russian law (27.07.2006 number 149-FZ)
that requires foreign companies to open their software to Russian security
services and to hand user data to law enforcement agencies. Sherman said the
passage of the sovereign internet law is one more item in this trend.
“When Russia passed its domestic internet bill into law, it
wasn’t clear how much the government would actually work to make it happen, but
now it’s clear they do intend to modify systems so the internet within Russian
borders can be cut off from the global net at will,” Sherman said. “These
disconnection tests which Russia has planned for the near future—as well as,
according to documents, annually going forward—are steps in the direction of
making this so-called RuNet work. They also line up with a series of
international pushes by authoritarian governments to make ‘cyber sovereignty’
of this kind more palatable to the global community.”
Comments
Post a Comment