Russia is tightening internet censorship ahead of this weekend’s election, guaranteeing President Vladimir V. Putin will remain in power for another six years, further shrinking one of the last remaining spaces for political activity, independent information and freedom of the press.
Russian authorities have stepped up their crackdown on digital tools used to circumvent internet blocks, restricted access to WhatsApp and other communications apps in certain areas during protests, and blocked websites and websites, according to civil society groups and researchers. We have expanded our program to block online services. and the companies affected.
They said Russia is turning to technologies that go beyond traditional hacking and digital surveillance practices and is taking a more systematic approach to changing how the domestic internet functions. In doing so, China is using methods pioneered by China and Iran to shape an authoritarian model of internet regulation that contrasts with the United States’ more open approach.
Mikhail Klimarev, a Russian telecommunications expert and executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a civil society group, said Russia “has reached a new level of blocking in the last six months.”
Internet censorship has been increasing in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the latest blockade has surprised even technology experts. This technology adds to the infrastructure of repression that Putin has built to keep protesters and opponents in check and feed the state’s propaganda diet.
The move comes at a critical time for Putin, who is dealing with the memorial of the Kremlin’s fiercest critic, Alexei A. Navalny, after he died in a Russian prison last month and the impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine. . . On Friday, Russians also began heading to the polls to vote in a presidential election that Putin is all but certain to win, and tightened internet controls show the government has no plans to take any chances.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s main internet regulator, did not respond to a request for comment.
Russia’s increased crackdown on the internet has been influenced by China, where the internet is severely restricted and social media is closely monitored.
In 2016, Fang Binxing, the father of the Great Firewall, the system used to censor the Internet in China, met with his Russian counterpart. The relationship then developed, according to leaked meeting minutes documents reviewed by The New York Times. The documents show how internet officials from both countries met in 2017 and 2019 to share information on combating encryption, blocking foreign sites and suppressing protests.
The lessons learned from the discussion have now been put into practice in Russia.
In January, as protests rocked the industrial region of Bashkortostan, officials successfully restricted local access to messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram. Mr. Klimarev, who tracks online censorship in Russia and runs a company called VPN Generator, said similar shutdowns had recently occurred in the Dagestan and Yakutia regions.
Other restrictions followed Mr. Navalny’s death last month. During Navalny’s funeral in Moscow, cellular networks in nearby areas were limited to slow speeds, making posting videos and images on social media more difficult, Mr. Klimarev said.
In recent weeks, Russian tech companies and online activists have also reported new government efforts to identify Internet traffic patterns originating from virtual private networks (VPNs), software designed to bypass blocks.
Roskomnadzor will identify VPNs, large and small, and terminate their connections, closing most of the last loopholes that allowed Russians to access global news sites or banned social media sites like Instagram. This approach, considered more sophisticated and requires expertise than previous tactics, mimics the way China performs at sensitive political moments.
Some VPNs are still available in Russia, but they are becoming increasingly difficult to find. The law, which took effect March 1, banned advertising for such services.
“If you look back at the beginning of 2022, it wasn’t that difficult to find a VPN,” said Stanislav Shakirov, technical director at Roskomsvoboda, a civil society group that advocates for an open internet. Improving.
Russia is also changing the way it censors websites and Internet services. Authorities used to rely primarily on telecom operators to block sites named in published blacklists, but they now appear to be relying more on centralized technology to more carefully block and slow down traffic coming from Moscow, the researchers said.
Authorities appear to be balancing a desire to control the Internet with technological limitations and fears of upsetting the public by restricting popular online platforms such as YouTube and Telegram used for news, entertainment and communication. The government has also faced engineering challenges, including earlier this year when experts said a failed test of a new blocking system left many major websites offline for about 90 minutes.
Experts said authorities were likely preparing for an incident that could derail this weekend’s election. Navalny’s supporters urged people to go to the polls at noon on Sunday to vote against Putin, hoping images of long lines would show the world the scale of discontent. The government may scale back its plans if it can prevent the spread of the images.
The technology is built on a Chinese-influenced playbook that is becoming more sophisticated every year. At high-level talks between China and Russia in 2017, Russian officials sought advice on how to block websites, limit global internet access and build a government-controlled internet similar to the Great Firewall, according to meeting transcripts and notes. It was released online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked documents.
There were also discussions about how to deal with the increase in encrypted data flows, how to target large mainstream messaging apps, and what to do about services like VPNs that can bypass the blocks. In the exchange, China highlighted real-name registration, a system that requires people to register for mobile services and social media using government ID cards, to keep them in check.
China and Russia “must build the necessary connections to jointly respond to current threats in the cyber environment,” Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov said during a visit to Chinese officials in 2017, according to a leaked copy of the speech.
In recent months, VPN blocking in Russia has become more severe than ever.
“The level of blocking we are seeing in Russia is much higher than what we are seeing in China,” said Yegor Sak, founder of Windscribe, a VPN provider used to bypass internet blocks in Russia.
With WhatsApp and Telegram, Russia has taken a different approach than China. After years of largely neglecting the service, authorities recently took steps to block access to the app at a critical moment of political instability. In Bashkortostan, a manufacturing and mineral hub with a large indigenous population, authorities temporarily blocked 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.
According to a post on VK, a major Russian social media site, the service outage became such a problem that people left messages on local politicians’ social media pages asking them to turn the service back on because they needed it for their daily lives.
“I can’t contact my school, I can’t talk to my doctor or my relatives,” one user said. Another person wrote: “Give me back WhatsApp and Telegram.”
The blocking was “critically important” because messaging apps used by millions of people were considered much more difficult to interfere with, according to Ksenia Ermoshina, an expert on Russian censorship and surveillance technologies at Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of California. Toronto. She said the telecommunications companies were likely cooperating under government orders.
This experiment suggests that we can potentially limit the growth of political movements by building capabilities that can be used in future moments of crisis.
“People protest when they see other people protesting,” said Hermosina, who is also a senior researcher at the Center for Internet and Society, part of France’s National Center for Scientific Research. But the ability to block entire regions would allow the Russian government to “better control regionalist and separatist movements” and prevent protests or other outrages from spreading.
The conduit for unregulated Internet traffic is slowly being clogged. Analysts say companies are being required by the government to install new surveillance equipment at telecommunications points where transnational internet cables enter Russia.
“The Soviet Union is coming back,” said Mazay Banzaev, operator of a Russian VPN called Amnezia. “That brings back full censorship.”
Anatoly Kurmanayev contributed to the report.