На русском языке:
Мнение. «Белорусский порядок» о новом Железном занавесе
The Telegram channel «Belarusian Order» published a big post about the new Iron Curtain. We quote their words unchanged.
With increasing anxiety I follow the news coming from the Russian Federation. And it’s not about the results of their, for Christ sake, elections. And how the Western technology giants, whose capitalization is larger than the GDP of whole Russia, obeyed the requirements of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor). This is no longer a question of the domestic policy of the Russian Federation, but a threat to the entire region, and Belarus in particular.
A brief background. On the eve of the elections to the Duma, the Russian opposition, in order to inflict maximum damage on the ruling party Yedro [United Russia – ed.], proposed the «Smart Voting» system. The Russian authorities responded with not clever repression.
The first, they put pressure on corporations, forcing them to remove the SV application from Apple Store and Google Play.
The second, the removal of content related to SV. Google deleted several videos with SV recommendations on Youtube, then removed the SV lists from Google Docs. Durov also removed the SV chatbot from Telegram. Considering our situation, imagine if the Voice bot had been removed on the eve of our election.
The third is the most dangerous. Roskomnadzor has launched a campaign to combat VPN services that allow you to circumvent their blocking. Here it is worth stopping in more detail.
Laws to combat the circumvention of blockings came into force in 2018. According to them, the owners of VPN services were obliged to restrict access to websites banned in the Russian Federation. And search engines should not display links to blocked resources.
Then people laughed, sighed, and forgot. But in vain. Roskomnadzor was increasing its monitoring capacity and was looking for technical solutions for blocking. This all resulted in TMCT, «Technical means of countering threats». This is something like SORM, only oriented to the study of traffic (DPI), its slowdown and complete blocking. It’s expensive, the implementation took time. Now it’s operating at full capacity.
Since June, more than a dozen popular services have been blocked in the Russian Federation — Psiphon, Nord, Hola, Tunnelbear, etc. In the future, they will come to the fact that they will be able to block not individual services, but the protocols with which this technology works. Detailed explanations of experts can be read here.
Without going into technical details, the Russian Federation approaches the implementation of «Cheburashka», the sovereign Internet on the Chinese model. Along the way, it gets down a bunch of civilian services, and no one cares about it. Foreign companies are exposed simply conditions, if you are not ready to fulfill — get a fine, leave the market, come under blocking. Plus, the disconnect button from the global network is laid in hardware.
In fact, a new Iron Curtain has been built, just in the digital space.
And now let us return to the situation in our long-suffering Republic. An archaic dictatorship, unable to live up to the challenges of the times, is trying to artificially inhibit technologies that can change it. The OAC (Operations and Analysis Center) has already rolled out the technology of the switch, the forced cancellation of the entire Internet. We haven’t made it up to deep control yet – it’s too expensive. But historically, any assholishness invented in Russia, sooner or later will be implemented in our country.
Someday, ‘Post-Soviets’ will find out that banned websites are gaining popularity with the help of Cloudfront and Azure. That the voices of truth they tried to silence are broadcasting via Youtube. That prison walls cannot protect Belarusians from the free world. Then they can enlist the help of Big Brother.
For example, to sign a roadmap «On the protection of the sovereign digital space of the Union State». Further, under the pretext of fighting the forest Cyber Partisans and the influence of the West, transfer digital control to the Russians. Technically difficult, but there are no barriers for patriots. And the real sovereignty will be next after the digital sovereignty. Or what will be left of it by then.
If someone thinks that this is an agitation or a horror story, I have to disappoint you. Russia is preparing for international isolation in earnest and in all directions. We need to resolve the issue for ourselves: which side of the border the Iron Curtain should fall on — along the border of the Grodno region, or Mogilev.
P.S.
If someone’s interested in blocking theme, I recommend you a book «Battle for RuNet«. And documentary series «Holy war. The history of RuNet«.
