Channeling China, Russia Eyes Its Own Great Firewall

By Thomas Grove (WSJ)

April 2, 2019 10:00 a.m. ET

New law would give the Kremlin the power to shut down websites and view all online traffic

MOSCOW—Russian authorities are seeking unprecedented control over the internet with a new law that would more effectively filter information coming into the country and allow Russia to cut itself off from global online traffic in a crisis.

President Vladimir Putin has presented the bill as a necessary measure to fight the threat of U.S. cyberattacks on Russia’s internet infrastructure, but free-speech activists say the law, expected to be passed in the coming months, is an attempt to clamp down on online dissent.

“Under the pretext of our own security, they’re trying to sell us a second-hand, beta version of the Chinese firewall,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, a lawyer and member of Roskomsvoboda, a Moscow-based internet-freedom advocacy group.

The stated purpose of the bill, which has passed through one reading in Russia’s lower house of parliament, or Duma, is twofold. It will give the agency that censors Russia’s communications power to more effectively control proscribed websites and direct access to the flow of information passing into the country’s internet infrastructure from abroad and between domestic internet exchange points.

The anticipated new law would make Russia one of the first countries apart from China to attempt to take control of the internet on a national level. Russia has consulted for years with China over internet protections. Fang Bingxing, the creator of China’s so-called Great Firewall has come to Russia on a number of occasions in previous years.

Some observers have called Russia’s plan an attempt at nationalizing the internet, one that could help insulate the country against cyberattacks from abroad in the event that tensions between Moscow and Washington ever escalate to cyberattacks against critical infrastructure.

“My feeling is this is the next step in an evolution in [which] Cold War cyber capabilities have grown to such an extent that they are only short of nuclear capabilities,” said Paul Barford, professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin.

Shortly after the law’s first reading in February, Mr. Putin said he supported the idea of boosting the state’s internet control. “The more sovereignty, including in the digital realm, the better,” he said.

The U.S. has been accused of launching crippling cyberattacks on Iran and North Korea. During last year’s midterm elections, U.S. cyber command attacked Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which the U.S. intelligence community has termed a troll farm, in a bid to block it from meddling as it did in the 2016 presidential elections.

The attack, as first reported by the Washington Post, took the agency offline but it said in a statement that its employees were able to continue working.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists in February that a number of cyberattacks on Russia had originated from the U.S. and Europe in previous years and that Russia had to prepare further measures to take control of the internet.

The bill is currently undergoing revisions after analysts realized it could affect commercial digital traffic over railways and pipelines, said Karen Kazaryan, chief analyst at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, a nonprofit collective for those who work in the Internet sector.

“There are some corrections that need to be made,” he said.

The law will also likely mandate the rollout across the country of an advanced method of monitoring network traffic called deep packet inspection, boosting Russian authorities’ ability to surveil internet users’ traffic and block restricted sites, analysts said.

Currently internet service providers block sites via IP addresses, but DPI will provide a greater analysis of internet traffic and more effective blocking of banned sites.

Moscow has tried to control the internet through more laws aimed at censoring websites based on their content and by introducing jail terms or fines for people who insult the government online. But the new law would enable the government to control the wholesale movement of internet traffic into the country and between regions.

Russia carried out its first test to control internet traffic in 2014, at the height of tensions between Moscow and the West over the Ukraine crisis. Last month, authorities similarly clamped down on a local protest in Russia’s predominantly Muslim region of Ingushetia in the North Caucasus.

The same thing happened last year when residents there had just started protests against efforts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed ruler of neighboring Chechnya, annexing part of their region through a land swap when their mobile signals stopped working, preventing videos of the protests from going viral on Russian social media.

Russia’s top communications censor, Roskomnadzor, ultimately told a lawyer in the region that traffic had been stopped by the order of law-enforcement officers. The point, observers said, was to stop video sharing from adding fuel to the protests.

“At some point the authorities began to understand that videos inside Russia are just as important as videos coming in from outside the country,” said Andrei Soldatov, journalist and author of “The Red Web,” a book on the struggle between Russia’s online community and the censors out to control it.

“Dissent spreading from one [Russian] region to another; that’s revolution,” Mr. Soldatov said.

The measure, which will redirect internet traffic along routes controlled solely by Roskomnadzor, has sparked protests in Moscow and Russia’s other larger cities from those who believe the law could severely curb internet freedoms.

Some see the high costs involved in installing the hardware, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, as simply a way to divert government funds to preferred communications companies, said Leonid Evdokimov, a software developer who protested against the law in St. Petersburg.

“Of course, it never hurts to spend some money on more equipment,” he said, sarcastically voicing a commonly held suspicion that the law was written to benefit companies friendly to the Kremlin, an allegation the Kremlin denies.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com