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

The discussion at the Sakharov Center was emotional. Roskomnadzor’s failure to provide any reason for the blocking outraged editors of the blocked sites. In the letters they all received they were simply told, with no explanation, that they would be blocked. Korsunsky remarked darkly, “Websites are blocked just because they are suppressed as enemy information sources. Putin said it openly: ‘The enemies.’ He’s going to fight with this. But legally, there is still a possibility—as long as we breathe, we need to do something. As well as to keep working.” But he urged, “We should be ready to work in a state of war.”

The editors debated possible legal avenues of resistance and technical solutions that could bypass the blocking. The odds of winning in court seemed slim. Ryklin angrily said that everybody should finally understand that their sites are blocked forever, and even if the lawyers would be able to win in court, the next day the General Prosecutor’s Office would find another article to use as pretext for blocking. [10] Agora, a human rights group based in Kazan that provides legal advocacy for victims of suspected human rights abuses, with a focus on journalists, political activists, bloggers, and NGOs, provided a lawyer, Damir Gainutdinov, to help the blocked sites in court, but eventually, despite all efforts, they failed.

Olga Pashkova from Ej.ru suggested launching a united platform for all blocked sites. Other journalists thought about posting extracts of the stories on Facebook. Nossik exclaimed, “Forget about Facebook—it would be blocked in a month. We are walking in the direction of North Korea!” Timchenko insisted that the blocked sites should turn to social media, “Launch your campaign in social networks and contact the administrators of large groups, for example in VKontakte. That’s all. This is a very big resource.”

The journalists thought of some joint action they might take, a campaign for the blocked websites, but it was clear this was not a good option. An editor of the Echo Moskvy website, which might have been counted upon to take up the campaign, was at the meeting but was conspicuously silent. Nossik was not discouraged, arguing that they all have an advantage: “We all work with bytes, right? And we can all interact with the same bytes.” He said that they don’t need to meet somewhere regularly to coordinate efforts; it’s enough to meet on Facebook. And when Facebook would be shut down, somewhere else.

But they all urgently needed to find a way to bypass the blocking. There was a lot of talk about Tor, a circumvention tool in widespread use around the world and essentially a network of virtual tunnels: instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover a user’s tracks so nobody at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going. In the case of the blocked sites, it meant that people who came to the blocked sites couldn’t be seen as coming from Russia, thus evading Roskomnadzor’s blocking. It’s easy to use, and the only problem with Tor is that a user must install Tor software on the computer to use its network.

That posed a fundamental problem: How could they teach readers to use circumvention tools? The blocked sites already lost thousands of readers, and although a committed audience would find a way to get to the sites, the question remained: How would they reach the rest?

Nossik came up with the idea to promote Tor and other circumvention tools on his page on LiveJournal.com and called others to follow his example. Some suggested to remember the Soviet dissident practice of disseminating information on carbon-copied typescript known as samizdat . Some offered to print leaflets.

One of those at the meeting was Artem Kozlyuk, a thirty-five-year-old born in Cherepovets in central Russia to a military family. He studied at the Cherepovets military school, spent a few years in the army, and soon moved to Moscow, where he joined the Pirate Party in 2011. The idea of Internet censorship shocked him, and the day the blacklist came into force, on November 1, 2012, he launched a project against filtering. It was called Roskomsvoboda , or Freedom from Roskomnadzor, and was also known as Rublacklist.net. On the home page of the website there is a link to the major treasure of the project—the total of how many sites are blocked and a list of sites blocked by mistake.

Ksenzov and Zharov, the brains behind Roskomnadzor, had made the official blacklist secret, ostensibly to avoid promoting the blocked sites and pages. The list is available only to authorized ISPs so they can check the lists daily. Kozlyuk was certain that the primitive system of filtering inevitably led to the blocking of innocent sites that happen to be hosted on the same IP address, so he made his cause to find a way to check the blacklist against the real numbers of blocked sites. Some liberal ISPs shared the data from the blacklists, and Kozlyuk was able to check how many sites are blocked along with the sites targeted by Roskomnadzor. The difference in numbers was astonishing—whereas Roskomnadzor insisted that only a few thousand sites were blocked, Kozlyuk’s figures showed tens of thousands of sites. Kozlyuk knew better than anyone in the room how the filtering was organized, and he was hopeful. He described how one day he wanted to go to a prohibited site, Grani.ru. When he did this, the page was blank—it was blocked. But his home ISP had defiantly put a message on the blank page, saying, “To bypass the censorship, click here.” The link then took the user to a site with a list of circumvention tools. Kozlyuk’s point was that many friendly ISPs might be enlisted to help bypass the censorship. Kozlyuk’s idea drew support, but few in the room believed it would be able to solve the problem of blocking.

But soon a technical solution was found, one that was much more effective at evading the blacklists.

Ruslan Leviev, then twenty-seven years old, is a computer geek and a lawyer by training. Short and thin, with earrings in both of his earlobes and often with a radical haircut, he was born in the Russian Far East, where he worked for an NGO providing poor citizens with legal support in court. In 2009 Leviev moved to Moscow, and two years later he joined the protests in Moscow against fraud in the parliamentary elections and was detained along with hundreds of outraged Muscovites. He spent two days in prison, and when he left the detention center, he decided to volunteer to help Navalny build his online projects. The first was the online elections watchdog Navalny launched.

When the law on filtering was debated in 2012, Leviev attended the meetings at Roskomnadzor as Navalny’s representative, and he got to know Ksenzov. Leviev tried to explain why the filtering was such a bad idea, and he invited Ksenzov to talk to the audience of Habrahabr, the biggest Russian web community of programmers, where Leviev published extracts of Navalny’s blog on fighting corruption. On January 4, 2013, Ksenzov started answering the participants’ questions and posted his answers for a few days. Leviev thought this was a very good sign—he even asked the audience to be polite with Ksenzov because he could not imagine an official from any other ministry department willing to talk to them.

When Navalny’s blog on LiveJournal was blocked on March 18, 2014—the blog on which Leviev had worked so hard—Leviev came to realize that the cooperation with the authorities was pointless. Everything seemed to change so quickly; Ksenzov at once started to attack Leviev, calling him a foreign agent and the fifth column because Leviev had volunteered for Navalny.

Leviev felt desperate, but one day a friend gave him an idea of how to bypass the blocking. When someone visits an Internet site, such as Lenta.ru, the domain name is linked to one or more Internet protocol addresses, which are a set of numbers. Sometimes there can be a whole list of these addresses linked to one domain. By changing the list of the Internet protocol addresses assigned to the domain on the site of domain names registration center, Leviev found that he could trick the blocking—even send it off in another direction entirely. In an experiment he manipulated the numbers so that when Roskomnadzor tried to block Navalny, they instead blocked a pro-Kremlin site called Lifenews.ru. Next he tried redirecting the censorship to block Roskomnadzor’s own internal list of sites that were currently blocked, paralyzing Roskomnadzor. [11] Nikita Likhachev, “Polzovateli pozhalovalis na blokirovku saita LifeNews” [Users Complained of the Blocking by the Site LifeNews], Tjournal, March 17, 2014, http://tjournal.ru/paper/lifenews-block . “It was like the blacklist blocked itself,” Leviev recalled.