Page 18 - bne_October 2021_20211004

18 I Companies & Markets bne October 2021
sure Team Navalny fails. Losing even a single "safe" seat to a #SmartVoting candidates would feel unthinkable. The Kremlin needs SmartVoting to be an abject failure.”
Blocking the Navalny App
The Kremlin has pulled out all the stops to crush the smart voting initiative and the state information and media regulator Roskomnadzor has made frantic efforts to close Navalny’s operation down.
The campaign started with declaring Navalny’s organisation extremist in June, so anyone co-operating with the project would face criminal charges and a long jail sentence.
The next step was to block Navalny's smart voting site on September 6 and then remove the Navalny app from both Google and Apple app stores.
At the same time, VPN networks that allow users to sidestep Kremlin blocks on sites were also largely disabled, starting in June. The result is that while much of the content was still accessible in Russia it has become increasingly difficult
“The next step was to block Navalny's smart voting site on September 6 and then remove the Navalny app from both Google and Apple app stores.”
to reach. The technology that enabled Roskomnadzor to block VPNs was first rolled out in the spring, when it was added to operators' servers as part of the new “sovereign RuNet” legislation that forces companies to bring their user information onshore.
The regulator conducted the first high-profile tests of this technology in the spring, when it decided to successfully slow Twitter down, but did not block it completely.
The final step has been to try to kill the list of smart candidates to vote for, which Team Navalny released on social media 48 hours ahead of the vote – a point where the Kremlin can no longer remove any of the names from the election roll – which was hosted on Google Docs.
Both Google and Apple rolled over and complied with the order and removed the Navalny app. Reportedly, rather than threatening the company with legal action, Google’s local staff in Russia were instead threatened with arrest to get their company to comply.
Late into the game on the second day of voting tech wunderkind Pavel Durov also agreed to disable bots on the Telegram message service that provide information to subscribers about who to vote for in the elections.
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Justifying the decision, Durov explained in a post on his Telegram channel that the network will observe Russia’s “election silence” during the voting process. “We consider this practice to be legitimate and call on Telegram users to respect it. Beginning at midnight, Moscow time [September 18], we plan to restrict the functionality of bots associated with election campaigning.”
The opposition leaders must be very disappointed, as Telegram has been the backbone of protests against many authoritarian regimes like Belarus and Iran, and in those countries it defied government orders to turn off the service, which is widely used by protest organisers.
Unlike these other protests, the Kremlin has been highly successful at muzzling the online resources that have so successfully been used against regimes elsewhere.
Part of this is due to the Kremlin specifically targeting the Navalny app and its lists. There was speculation that the Kremlin would simply attempt to turn the internet off, as happened in the Minsk mass demonstrations last summer, or close sites like Twitter and Facebook.
“We don't seem – yet – to be seeing what many observers most feared: a massive, Belarus-style internet blackout.
Of course, a lot of the censorship was done well before the elections kicked off. But there could have been more,” says Greene. “There had also been at least some expectation that access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be severely limited or blocked altogether. Thus far (and there's two days to go), none of that has happened. The Kremlin seems satisfied that its combination of centralised anti-Navalny disruption and decentralised "proactive compliance" by local election managers will do the trick.”
Apple and Google under pressure
Late in the evening of September 8 Roskomnadzor began testing blocking of public DNS services Google and Cloudflare, which protect web portals, The Bell reports.
“The tests lasted only an hour, and we learned about them only thanks to the vigilance of IT experts. After that, it was reported that Roskomnadzor recommended state-owned companies to switch to Russian DNS servers or NSDI (National Domain Name System) rather than use foreign ones,” The
Bell said in a report. “Why all this is needed is anyone's guess, but most likely the matter is in the services for encrypting DNS queries, including the DoH service mentioned in the regulator's reports. With its help, you can hide from the provider the address of the site to which the user is trying to enter. This is exactly what Roskomnadzor is now trying to fight: encryption prevents operators from seeing the user's request and, if necessary, blocking it. The problem is that blocking public DNS will inevitably lead to the disabling of an unpredictable set of different services and, importantly, IoT devices, so Roskomnadzor will probably use this tool only in emergency cases.”