Russia’s internyet: Kremlin readies test for its ‘sovereign’ firewall

A Russian man turns on the TV. Channel 1 is showing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. He turns to Channel 2. It’s Brezhnev again. Channel 3 – Brezhnev. When the man tries Channel 4, a police officer appears on screen.

“Think twice before switching again,” the officer says.

The access to information enjoyed by contemporary Russians is worlds away from the experience described in this popular Soviet anecdote. Today, seven in 10 are owners of smart phones. Half are social media users. YouTube broadcasts are eclipsing TV propaganda as a way the youngest generation gets their news.

But that doesn't mean the state’s instinct to control the information its citizens view has also moved on in sync.

Later this week, the Kremlin’s controversial “sovereign internet” bill will finally go live. In theory at least, the law will introduce the most wide-reaching restrictions the Russian internet — or “RuNet” — has ever seen.

Among the provisions are a system of filtering traffic, known as deep packet inspection; a requirement for government bodies to use certified Russian technologies; and the possibility of switching off all connections to the world wide web “in an emergency”.

According to the RBC publication, the Ural Federal District in central Russia has been chosen to pilot the new filter technologies.

Proponents claim the measures are necessary to protect Russia from hostile attacks from abroad. Critics suggest it is an insurance policy for the government to stop dangerous ideas from spreading.

“Some may have talked themselves into believing an imaginary threat from abroad,” says Gregory Asmolov, a research fellow on the Russian internet at King’s College London. “But domestic politics and the possibility of making cash seem to be the more obvious drivers.”

For all the hype, it is not entirely clear what - if anything - will change when the bill becomes law on 1 November.

Unusually for a bill of this sort, much of the secondary legislation to the law is still to be written. Those legislative acts that have been written are vague and generalised. This might suggest that bureaucrats themselves are unsure about how to implement the law.

Mikhail Klimarev, the head of the Internet Protection Society, a non-governmental organisation, says that the law may never be fully enacted.

“Clearly, some people are pushing for some kind of killer switch,” he told The Independent. “But it’s one thing for them to write it into law, and another thing to implement it. It basically isn’t feasible.”

The Kremlin’s interest in the internet is relatively recent. Over Vladimir Putin’s first two terms, his administration concentrated on controlling narratives in TV and mass print media. It was only after digital technologies showed their organisational potential during the 2011-12 protests that the Kremlin began to seriously consider curbing online freedoms.

Now, a group of security hardliners is pushing for as close an approximation of the Chinese firewall as is possible. To this end, Moscow has been working in close technological cooperation with Beijing since at least 2015.

But there are obvious barriers to the implementation of a Chinese firewall system. First, the Chinese system is a lot older – institutionalised as early in 2006 – allowing native internet technologies to develop almost organically alongside. The Chinese system is also complicated, with filters existing on at least four levels: banning sites; blocking IP addresses; keyword blocks; and mirror checks.

For most of its existence, the Russian internet has been a free and uncontrolled environment. The limited filters applied today are primitive — essentially a block list implemented by internet providers — and easily navigable by an average web user.

Russia’s track record of implementing digital restriction laws is also mixed. To this day, authorities have been unable to enforce a law requiring US tech giants to relocate servers to Russia. LinkedIn was switched off in 2016 after ignoring appeals to comply. But other refuseniks – not least the much larger Facebook and Google – continue to operate unhindered.

And in 2018, the Kremlin suffered a most embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Telegram messaging app.

The encrypted messenger was defiant in refusing to co-operate with Russia's security agency, the FSB, over their request to provide backdoor keys to user data. In April, a Moscow court blacklisted the company, in the full expectation that authorities would be able to block the programme from functioning.

But Telegram's engineers were one step ahead and began to hide traffic behind dynamic IP addresses. As Russian authorities searched for Telegram’s all-elusive traffic, the authorities' desperation increased and they ended up turning off large sections of the internet for hours. Online shops, banks and even the presidential site stopped were all inadvertently shut down in the process.

There is little to suggest that state officials will be any more effective this time around. But the danger, says Mr Asmolov, is that this time the legislation will do something different, since it binds government officials to the idea of changing the “infrastructure” of the Russian internet.

“People with no technical expertise are making decisions about things they don’t understand," he said. “At best, it will slow the internet. At worst it will break it completely.”

Bureaucrats will likely attempt to make “symbolic” interventions in an attempt to show that the law is working, he says. But how far they go will depend on the reaction of the Russian public. Last year, tens of thousands turned out at a protest for uncensored internet. In other countries, hundreds of thousands have turned out.

Klimarev says it is unlikely the security bloc will ever give up on their firewall project entirely.

“These guys are obsessed with the idea of a switch to filter out countries, towns, groups of people, but that isn’t how the internet works,” he said.

“The fear, of course, is that they will go to the logical next step, and pull the plug completely.”