Here are the main points of Russia’s new Sovereign Internet Law:
Development of new rules for network traffic routing
Establishment of cross-border and internal traffic exchange points
Installation of government monitoring hardware on traffic exchange points
Creation of national domain name system
The Sovereign Internet Law is very vague and does not clearly define the threats, hardware, and software to be implemented. To date, there is no clear plan or division of authority, but the implications are clear: It will change how businesses and consumers alike use the internet in Russia. There are a lot of similarities between the Chinese Great Firewall and the new Russian Sovereign Internet Law. Both Russia and China limit expression of free speech and prohibit criticism of the state. Both governments use any methods or technologies at their disposal to secure the current political status quo and distribution of power. But despite all the similarities, it will take years for Russia to reach the advanced level of surveillance and content blocking seen in China—if it ever does. Runet was initially built to adhere to open Western standards, while the Chinese version was built as a controlled network from the ground up.
Beyond the inherently political nature of internet censorship, both China and Russia have clear financial motives: Blocking internet giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others to replace them with internal counterparts like Weibo, WeChat, Yandex, VK, QQ, and Baidu provides an enormous economic boost to China’s and Russia’s domestic markets. Although Russia has similar domestic companies and products, it lacks China’s population of more than 1.3 billion people who help fuel Chinese internet companies’ success. In addition, Russia is officially a democracy and is still somewhat limited in the extent to which it can control its citizens before breaking the facade. Over the years, the Russian government has implemented a series of cyber laws that have extended its control over media and telecommunication channels and their content. Russia has also implemented hard censorship and surveillance by providing an intrusive level of access to personal and private data. With the latest Sovereign Internet Law, Russia is centralizing its surveillance and censorship apparatus.
This was written by Andrey Yakovlev a Security Researcher at IntSights, focused on intelligence hunting from the Russian Dark Web. He is an experienced professional with nearly a decade of expertise in the cybersecurity field. Andrey specializes in threat discovery, computer forensics and behavioral analysis of Trojans.
The article has been published here for educational purposes only.
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