Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

On July 4 the State Duma passed another law prohibiting the storage of Russians’ personal data anywhere but in Russia. Once again members of parliament pointed to Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance to justify the action. A member of Putin’s United Russia party suggested nominating Snowden for a Nobel Prize. In effect, Russian security agencies received expanded powers over the Internet under the pretext of protecting the personal data of Russian citizens from the menace that Snowden had described.

The law stipulated that global platforms would relocate their servers to Russia by September 1, 2015. After this, all three global platforms—Google, Twitter, and Facebook—sent high-ranking representatives to Moscow. Details of their talks were kept secret. On July 28 Ksenzov, who had turned Twitter into his main channel of communication, tweeted, “They start a war against us. A full-scale Third World Information one.” On August 5 he triumphantly retweeted news from the state-controlled RIA Novosti agency: “For the first time, Apple has begun to store personal user data on the Chinese soil.”

The pressure on the global platforms became enormous. Of the trio, only Google had an office in Moscow. Very secretive and shielded from journalists by a hired public relations company, Google’s government relations officer was Marina Zhunich. She had started her career at the Moscow office of the BBC’s Russian service and then briefly joined the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Hers was a classic career for a graduate of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which groomed young people for service in diplomacy. In the 2000s she worked in public relations at international companies in Moscow. She joined Google in 2009, when Medvedev was president and the Internet was his most enjoyable toy. In the summer of 2012 Zhunich found herself in the eye of the storm. In July she made a statement on YouTube criticizing the proposals to block sites by their Internet protocol or IP addresses. [32] Marina Zhunich, YouTube, July 18, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KrOhZNsEo . Then she attended most of the meetings at the Ministry of Communications, and some progovernment Internet businessmen openly expressed unhappiness with her active involvement in Russian policy.

Two years later, in June 2014, it was revealed that Zhunich had herself been put under surveillance by private security services hired by businessmen close to the Kremlin—she had been spied on along with journalists of TV Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta . When the surveillance was made public by the hacker group Anonymous, Google was silent. We tried to talk to Zhunich at a conference, but she slipped away. We then turned to Facebook to connect with her, and for two days attempted to coax her into an interview. She was very guarded, and when we asked about surveillance of her, she replied, “No, I will not take part in that.” [33] Marina Zhunich, conversations with authors, December 2014.

On November 14, 2014, just after 7:00 p.m. and already dark, dozens of people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, were searching for a small red-brick building in Moscow. It was not easy, as the tiny structure was in the yard of a derelict factory, with no signs to help the visitors find it. The visitors, most of them journalists working for Russian online news media, seemed to be lost, searching for the modest venue for a ceremony of the national Internet media awards named after Edward Snowden.

The Russian Association for Electronic Communications had announced in April the establishment of the new award and claimed they had secured agreement from Snowden. But many of the journalists knew it was Alexey Venediktov who was behind the idea. Venediktov positioned himself as a quiet intermediary between the digital news and social media and his own high-placed contacts in the Kremlin. His personal assistant had secured the agreement of Snowden for the award. The assistant was also inserted by Venediktov into a team of experts to work on the controversial Bloggers Law. Venediktov was an editor-in-chief of Echo Moskvy, the radio station that had been a champion of liberal democracy since the last days of the Soviet Union, but he also maintained good contacts in the Kremlin, including, periodically, Putin himself.

On the cold day in November chosen to award the prizes, the mood was cheerless. Once they found the building, the journalists encountered a band that tried to raise their spirits, to no avail. Two of the show’s hosts, Tatyana Felgenhauer and Alexander Plushev, both of them journalists from Echo Moskvy, wore long faces—the fate of the station was increasingly in doubt, in part because of some indiscreet tweets by Plushev that drew the ire of Putin’s team. The chairman of the board of directors of the station, Mikhail Lesin, who had tried to lay his hands on the Internet in December 1999 at the meeting with Putin, warned that that it’s “entirely possible” to fire Venediktov. Everyone at Echo was on edge.

Plushev and Felgenhauer tried their best while giving the awards, making some jokes, but when Plushev read a gag about his possible firing, he laughed bitterly. The show itself was sad and confused. Ilya Klishin, now the editor of TV Dozhd’s website, was clearly shocked when he got his award, shared with an editor of the website of Lifenews.ru, a shameless pro-Kremlin tabloid-style TV channel that was preparing to take up occupancy of TV Dozhd’s premises after TV Dozhd had been expelled from the Red October complex.

One of those in the crowd was Stas Kozlovsky, leader of the Wikipedia community in Russia and a professor in the psychology department at Moscow State University. Kozlovsky, thirty-eight, discovered Wikipedia in 2003, when its Russian version had only a few hundred articles. He gave up his blog and started to write for Wikipedia. Though he looked a bit like a Cheshire cat, Kozlovsky was famous for being a fierce fighter for Internet freedom. He was the one who, at Irina Levova’s urging, put Russian Wikipedia into a blackout in the summer of 2012 to protest Internet filtering and has been battling on behalf of Wikipedia since the authorities first tried to block the online encyclopedia.

Artem Kozlyuk, a head of Rublacklist.net, the watchdog that keeps tabs on which sites have been blacklisted, greeted him with a knowing smile: “Hi, Stas, are you ready for a blackout in May?” In May 2015 a new law was to come into force that would make it possible to block all kinds of sites if they carried information without signed agreements from authors or rights holders, a measure described as an antipiracy law. It would almost certainly lead to blocking Wikipedia. “Now any hyperlink to any text or page on the Internet can cause blocking of a website. The Russian Wikipedia contains nearly 1.2 million articles, and each has dozens of hyperlinks to the sources,” Kozlovsky told us.

At the Snowden ceremony there was no sign of the man who had loaned it his name. When Andrei pointed that out to Kozlovsky, he replied with a sad smile, “Well, Snowden could have done good things globally, but for Russia he was a disaster.”

Four months later, in March 2015, the Ministry of Communications convened a gathering of the biggest Russian data centers to discuss the relocation of servers. A representative of Rostelecom, a state-controlled Russian operator, stepped in to announce that Google had already relocated the servers to the operator’s data center, adding, “The Company [Google] is our client now, and we are the restricted access, semi-government facility.” [34] Irina Yusbekova, “Google [Has] Begun to Relocate the Servers to Russian Data-Centers,” April 10, 2015, RBC Daily. At the time Google declined to provide comments.