A new book The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan reveals the subtle as well as forceful pressures that persuade Russian technology companies to comply with Internet surveillance and government censorship (read President Vladimir Putin).
Drawing from scores of interviews personally conducted with numerous prominent officials in the Ministry of Communications and web-savvy activists challenging the state, Andrei and Irina’s incisive and alarming investigation into the Kremlin’s massive online-surveillance state exposes just how easily a free global exchange can be coerced into becoming a tool of repression and geopolitical warfare.
The Red Web highlights the many strands that link today’s Russia to its violent, autocratic past. The book traces the roots of Russia’s Internet censorship far beyond Putin. The authors also chart the history of Sorm, a sophisticated system first developed by the KGB to eavesdrop on phone calls. The Sistema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriyatiy or System of Operative Search Measures has been giving the FSB, successor to the KGB, a back door to spy on Internet communications since 1998.
According to the authors, Russia’s spy agencies can snoop on emails via Sorm. The FSB’s (Federal Security Service) legal powers go well beyond those of the US National Security Agency. Russian ISPs are obliged to install Sorm black boxes, give access to the state, and are clueless as to what Russian intelligence agents would do with the data.
Since Putin’s undercover invasion of eastern Ukraine, the attack on the country’s independent media has got worse. The Kremlin uses an array of methods including DDoS attacks against opposition websites, and an army of paid “trolls” who post pro-Putin comments on Russian and western news outlets. The country has promulgated policies to censor the Internet through laws banning extremist content and requiring social networking and financial companies to base their data servers in Russia.
In 2014, Putin threw his support behind a plan to isolate the Internet in Russia from the rest of the World Wide Web. The Vedomosti reported that Russian ISPs might be forced to install “equipment that would make it possible to sever Russia’s access to the global Internet, in the event of an emergency”. Russian ISPs might be ordered to kill access to websites hosted outside of Russia during “military actions” or “serious domestic protests”, it added. Putin explained that the plan was intended to defend the country’s digital sovereignty and ‘secure’ Russia Internet in a national emergency.
This Article (Inside The Red Web: How Russia Uses The Internet For Surveillance) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
But Russia isn’t an empire founded an genocidal militarized piracy : like the American’s slaughtered the Natives out of entitlement and greed to “sell” back their land or put them on “reserves”… I have faith a communist’s objectives are far more honorable than a capitalist pirate’s 😛
About the writer : A retired Canadian with no (misguided / influenced / bought-off) vested interest in money 😛
Wait….you mean the EUROPEAN settlers that came to North America and rescued south Americans from the cannibalistic natives.
Before you bash ‘Americans’, learn history. Americans are Europeans,that’s first.
Second, native Americans were cannibles. They don’t teach you that in history class. But history itself doesn’t lie.
And when you talk bad about americans, you are speaking bad of your European ancestors.
I really wish the world would learn the TRUTH about America and the americans. You would all actually be pleasantly surprised.
Are you actually serious? The Europeans invaded the Americas, they didn’t settle there. They ousted anything pure in front of them , labelled them savages and “Cannibals” and heathens, this made it easier for the jewish/christian “settlers” to believe.
Mass genocide on a scale much larger than anything before or since.
I think it’s you and rest of your brainwashed ‘mercans who need to look at their history. Not just the watered down propaganda they call education.
The fact you believe Native Americans were “cannibles” (sic) makes any further point you have invalid.