Russia is stepping up its internet censorship ahead of an election this weekend that is sure to give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power, further shrinking one of the last remaining spaces for political activism, independent information and free speech .
Russian authorities have stepped up a crackdown on digital tools used to bypass internet blocks, restricting access to WhatsApp and other communication apps in certain areas during protests and expanding a program to disrupt websites and online services, according to groups civil society, researchers and affected companies.
Russia, they said, is turning to techniques that go beyond established hacking and digital surveillance practices, taking a more systemic approach to changing the way its domestic internet works. In doing so, the country is using methods pioneered by China and Iran, forging an authoritarian model for internet regulation that contrasts with the more open approach of the United States.
Russia “has reached a new level of blockade in the last six months,” said Mikhail Klimarev, a Russian telecommunications expert and executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a civil society group.
Internet censorship has been increasing in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the latest blocks have surprised even technical experts. The techniques add to an infrastructure of repression that Mr. Putin has built to keep protesters and opponents in check and feed the country a diet of state propaganda.
The moves come at a critical time for Mr. Putin, who is dealing with memorials to Aleksei A. Navalny, the Kremlin’s fiercest critic, after he died last month in a Russian prison, as well as the fallout from an ongoing war in Ukraine. On Friday, Russians also begin heading to the polls to vote in a presidential election that Mr Putin is certain to win, with stepped-up internet controls showing the government plans to take no chances.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s main Internet regulator, did not respond to a request for comment.
In stepping up its crackdown on the Internet, Russia has taken cues from China, where the Internet is highly restricted and social media is closely monitored.
In 2016, Fang Binxing, the father of China’s Great Firewall, the system used to censor the country’s internet, met with his Russian counterparts. The relationship has since developed, according to leaked documents from meeting notes reviewed by The New York Times. The documents show how internet officials from the two countries met in 2017 and 2019 to share information on fighting encryption, blocking foreign sites and curbing protests.
The lessons learned from the discussions have now been put into practice in Russia.
In January, as protests rocked the country’s industrial province of Bashkortostan, officials successfully restricted local access to messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram. Similar outages have recently occurred in the regions of Dagestan and Yakutia, said Mr. Klimarev, who monitors Internet censorship in Russia and runs a company called VPN Generator.
After Mr Navalny’s death last month, further restrictions followed. During Mr Navalny’s funeral in Moscow, mobile phone networks in nearby areas were reduced to slower speeds, making it harder to post videos and images on social media, Mr Klimarev said.
In recent weeks, Russian tech companies and online activists have also reported new government efforts to track Internet traffic patterns originating from virtual private networks, or VPNs, software designed to bypass blocks.
Roskomnadzor detects VPNs large and small and shuts down connections, closing many of the last loopholes that allowed Russians to access global news sites or banned social media sites like Instagram. The approach, considered more sophisticated than previous tactics and requiring specialized technologies, mimics what China does at sensitive political times.
Some VPNs remain available in Russia, but they are becoming increasingly difficult to find. A law that went into effect on March 1 banned advertisements for such services.
“If we look back at the beginning of 2022, finding a VPN was not that difficult,” said Stanislav Shakirov, technical director of Roskomsvoboda, a civil society group that supports an open internet, adding that the change shows how quickly capabilities of Russia. improved.
Russia is also changing the way it censors websites and internet services. After relying primarily on telecommunications providers to block websites named on a published blacklist, authorities now appear to be relying more on centralized technology to block and slow traffic more subtly than Moscow, researchers said.
Officials appear to be balancing a desire to control the Internet with technical restrictions and fears of angering the public by restricting popular online platforms such as YouTube and Telegram, which are used for news, entertainment and communication. The government has also faced engineering challenges, such as earlier this year when several important websites went offline for about 90 minutes, which experts attributed to a botched test of a new blocking system.
Authorities were likely preparing for events that could tarnish this weekend’s election, experts said. Mr Navalny’s supporters called on people to go to the polls at midday on Sunday to vote against Mr Putin, hoping images of long queues would show people the scale of discontent. The government could undermine the plan if it can prevent the images from being disseminated.
The techniques are based on a Chinese-influenced playbook that gets more sophisticated every year. In high-level meetings between China and Russia in 2017, Russian officials sought advice on methods of blocking websites, limiting access to the global internet and creating a government-controlled Internet similar to the Great Firewall, according to records and notes from the meetings made available online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked documents.
Discussions also included how to combat the rise of encrypted data streams, how to target larger messaging apps, and what to do with services like VPNs that can bypass blocks. In the exchanges, China emphasized the use of real-name registration — a system that requires the use of a government ID to sign up for mobile phone services and social media — as a way to keep people under control.
China and Russia must “establish the necessary connections to jointly address current cyber threats,” Alexander Zharov, who headed Roskomnadzor, told visiting Chinese officials in 2017, according to a transcript of the speech released by leaked out.
In recent months, VPN blocks from Russia have gone further than ever.
“The level of blocking we see in Russia far exceeds what we see in China,” said Yegor Sak, founder of Windscribe, a Canadian VPN provider used in Russia to bypass internet blocks.
With WhatsApp and Telegram, Russia has taken a different approach than China. After largely leaving the services alone for years, authorities recently tried to cut off access to the apps at key moments of political instability. In Bashkortostan, a manufacturing and mineral hub with a large indigenous population, authorities temporarily cut off access to Telegram and WhatsApp in January in response to protests that began after the arrest of a local environmental activist.
Meta, which owns WhatsApp, declined to comment. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
The outage became such a problem that people left messages on the social media pages of local politicians to turn the services back on because they needed them for daily life, according to posts on VK, Russia’s main social media site.
“I can’t get to school and I can’t talk to my doctor and relatives,” said one user. “Give us WhatsApp and Telegram back,” wrote another.
The blocks were “very important” because messaging apps, used by millions of people, were considered much harder to disrupt, according to Ksenia Ermoshina, an expert on Russian censorship and surveillance technology. Telecom companies likely cooperated, following government orders, he said.
The experiment suggests growing capabilities that can be used in future moments of crisis, potentially limiting the rise of political movements.
“People protest when they see other people protesting,” Ms Hermosina said. But with the ability to cut off entire regions, the Russian government can “better control regional and separatist movements” and prevent protests or other anger from spreading.
The openings for anarchic Internet traffic are slowly closing. At telecommunications points where interstate Internet cables enter Russia, companies are being asked by the government to install new monitoring equipment, analysts said.
“The Soviet Union is back,” said Mazay Banzaev, the operator of a Russian VPN called Amnezia. “With this, full censorship returns.”
Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed to the report.
