Politech: FC: Internet control in post-USSR countries: Russia, Ukraine, etc.

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

*********

> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 19:04:02 -0700
> From: Alexander Moskalyuk <alexander () moskalyuk com>
> X-Mailer: The Bat! (v1.34a) UNREG / CD5BF9353B3B7091
> Organization: Moskalyuk.com
> To: declan () well com
> Subject: Internet control issues in post-USSR countries
>
> Greetings, Declan,
>
> Below is the paper that I submitted to Civic Education Project
> recently, it deals with the issues of Internet control here in Russia,
> Ukraine and Kazakstan.
>
> Alex
> alex () moskalyuk com
>
> ======================================================================
>
>
> Government Control of Information Technologies: the Post-Soviet Experience
>
> The 20th century will be remembered by the creation and collapse of the 
> world's largest empire, the territory of which comprised 1/6th of the 
> world. The Soviet Union officially was claimed to be non-existent in 1991, 
> but the infrastructure still remained there to serve the needs of the new 
> independent states. About four years later the world experienced a series 
> of events, which would afterwards be referred to as the Internet boom. 
> Nerds, enthusiasts and geeks around the world all participated in uniting 
> the world's computer networks, which gave birth to the Internet, as we 
> know it today. Very soon, the Internet proved to be a very powerful 
> mechanism of information exchange, bringing urgent data to the people's 
> desktops. One interesting thing about the Net was the elimination of 
> boundaries.  From now on a person's physical location influenced only 
> their cost of being online, by all other features it was hard to 
> differentiate between Internet users in the United States or Mor!
>  occo. The next best thing about the Internet was its ability to transfer 
> information with speed, unknown to humanity before the Internet.
> Of course, such a powerful phenomenon as the Net couldn't possibly remain 
> beyond the attention of the former KGB offspring. They now were dispersed 
> among the different independent nations, serving the needs of the current 
> governments. Very slowly the special services started paying attention to 
> the network, which could transfer encrypted messages across the world in a 
> matter of seconds^Å the network which made express mail almost useless and 
> the network which was gaining popularity, regardless of its high price, in 
> the former Soviet Union. 1998 can be considered the boom of the former KGB 
> offices' undivided attention to network affairs. Soon, there were very few 
> individuals who would not know what the Net was.  The Internet Service 
> Providers were advertising their services on radio and television, and the 
> local oligarchs started buying the stock of the Internet companies at 
> home. Very differently, each country having its own position towards the 
> Internet, the governments star!
>  ted approaching the global network, with one mission in mind - to control.
>
> ========
> Russia
> ========
>
> The Russian government was among the first to initiate an anti-Internet 
> campaign in order to get a better handle on the so-called communication 
> problem, which the government viewed as a threat to the previous status 
> quo. Russian information was mostly controlled by the KGB successor, the 
> FSB. The document called SORM, which stands for System of Operative and 
> Investigative Procedures in Russian, appeared in the Russian legislative 
> world in 1995. The 1995 Law on Operational Investigations gave the FSB the 
> authority to monitor all private communications, from postal 
> correspondence to cell-phone calls and electronic mail, provided that the 
> security service first obtained a warrant from a court. After a series of 
> meetings with the national and local ISPs it became clear that the whole 
> goal was to have the provider install a certain black box, which would 
> have access to all the incoming and outgoing e-mail activity on the 
> server. The provider itself was responsible for paying the !
>  costs of installing the equipment and wiring up the local KGB office 
> with a high-speed leased line. That would definitely create certain 
> financial pressure on the small Internet companies due to their tight 
> budgeting problems. Thus, the rumors were that SORM, besides being 
> initiated by the FSB, was being co-sponsored by big ISPs.  By doing so 
> they would eliminate competition and leave the market open only for the 
> big players. "Most Internet providers in Moscow, including all of the 
> large providers and many in the provinces, have opened a hole for 
> security agents to peep at traffic," said Anatoly Levenchuk, a Russian 
> Internet expert. Anatoly's site, located at 
> http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium/sorm has a number of articles 
> dedicated to SORM regulations, and, among them, banners and clipart 
> dedicated to the anti-SORM Internet movement. An example would be a 
> Microsoft Outlook window with the error message, saying "We're sorry, but 
> the FSB officer responsible for reading yo!
>  ur e-mail is away right now. Please re-send your message later". As ma
> ny analysts suppose, Russian special forces have a nasty habit of selling 
> information gathered electronically to the highest bidder, and the 
> information ends up serving political ends. As the Russian daily newspaper 
> Noviye Izvestia noted recently, Internet users are already ironically 
> referring to SORM as "System for Scandalously Unveiling Investigative 
> Materials."
> One provider in southern Volgograd, Bayard-Slavia Communications, actually
> refused when security service agents sought to receive full and 
> uncontrolled access to all of their clients and their communications. 
> Bayard-Slavia had its main communication line cut off and faced threats of 
> fines from government officials. But, it won a court case against the 
> security service last fall. However, not all the Internet community thinks 
> SORM presents a danger to security. Anton Nossik, the editor-in-chief of 
> several major Internet publications, is less concerned than others, saying 
> security service agents already have access to electronic traffic and 
> would not be able to monitor its ever-increasing volumes in full. Nossik 
> is also related to another big Internet scandal, which happened between 
> his sponsoring organization, the Fund for Efficient Politics and the 
> Russian Central Election Committee, which was responsible for maintaining 
> the parliamentary elections this December.
> The Internet site, maintained and supported by the fund, was publishing 
> the results of the exit polls in real time. According to Russian laws, any 
> results of the elections cannot be published in the media while the 
> election is in the process. That's why Gleb Pavlovsky, who is the head 
> analyst of the Fund for Efficient Politics, received a call from the local 
> FSB office with the request "to shut down all that Internet". In an hour, 
> however, the site was shut down, obviously due to the pressure on the 
> hosting provider from more technically-literate FSB officers than those 
> who called Pavlovsky. The mirror of the site, located on the American 
> continent, however, continued to function and thus drew the attention of 
> the FSB, which tried to shut this site down as well. Alas, the ISP 
> providing the services for hosting www.elections99.com was not located in 
> Russia and obviously couldn't care less about the Russian laws.
> The elections being over, Pavlovsky was summoned to the local police 
> office.  The officials were quite satisfied that the Internet was not 
> media at all, rather, it was a medium for creating different types of 
> electronic media. Several weeks later the Russian government, envisioning 
> the same problem happening during the Presidential elections in March, 
> decided to propose a legislative act, by which the Internet was considered 
> a media, which should be regarded as a subject to Russian laws. Obviously, 
> this act of courage by the government drew attention from the network 
> media, which published feature articles, full of sarcasm towards the 
> Russian Central Election Committee. "From now on, the entire Internet, 
> including Yahoo, Amazon, Wired and all the personal sites in the world is 
> considered a Russian electronic media", quoted one of the electronic 
> publications on the day the proposal reached the Parliament. The Russian 
> government has not yet formed its exact position towards the Internet 
> issues in the country, nevertheless, it is continuing to install SORM 
> devices in the offices of major service providers.
> ========
> Ukraine
> ========
>
> Involved in several major conflicts between the President and the 
> parliament, the Ukraine government appeared quite regarding Internet 
> regulation, of which it has none. On September 19th the President of 
> Ukraine planned to introduce a bill, which would require ISPs to provide 
> full access to the e-mail activity on the server to the local KGB office, 
> which in Ukraine is renamed to SBU. The document does not differ much from 
> its Russian counterpart and is obviously written by the highest SBU 
> officials imitating their Russian colleagues. The fate of the document, 
> however, is different. In September '99 the confrontation between the 
> President and the Parliament reached its highest point. The shrewd 
> executive officials knew quite well, that whatever went to the Parliament 
> of Ukraine from the Office of President, would get refused regardless of 
> content. Thus it was a time when the administration had to sacrifice some 
> legislative initiatives in order to have some other bills passed.!
>   Since the SBU was the primary beneficiary of the SORM-like bill, the 
> President's Office decided that it was time to get rid of the unneeded 
> bill that had been written up by another government agency. At that time, 
> just before the elections, the agency was even suspected of disloyalty to 
> the current executive power.
> Thus Ukraine remained one of the most liberal countries as to Internet 
> regulation. Will it be a long-time victory or not? No one knows. The best 
> guess is that the Ukrainian special services are watching their Russian 
> colleagues' experience in order to follow the efficiency of the SORM 
> program. The probability of Ukraine initiating a program of strict 
> Internet control remains low, since the country depends on international 
> donations to its tight budget. Imposing government control upon the flow 
> of information might disturb some companies dealing in Ukraine, those, 
> which had complained for a long time about the country's level of 
> corruption and numerous regulations. Recently the Prosecutor general of 
> Ukraine Mykhailo Poteben'ko has complained about the great deal of 
> discrediting information about the current Ukrainian President Leonid 
> Kuchma. Indeed, after some research one could find the sites with the 
> Swiss account numbers of Kuchma's family. Whether the published informatio!
>  n is true or not, the Ukrainian prosecutor promised to do everything 
> possible to make the data disappear. The means are dubious, considering 
> that the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine isn't even connected 
> to the Internet, and most of the employees have a very vague knowledge 
> about the global computer network.
> ===========
> Kazakhstan
> ===========
>
> Among the former Soviet states, Kazakhstan remains one of the most 
> conservative and strict in terms of information control. Kazakhstan's 
> President, Nursultan Nazarbaev is widely criticized on the Web for 
> corruption and several known facts of money laundering by the President's 
> family. One of the sites, which belongs to the International Eurasia 
> Foundation, on November 9th, 1999 found itself being censored by the 
> Kazakhstan officials. The users which typed the site's URL 
> (http://www.eurasia.org.ru) found themselves confronting the message which 
> announced that "Connection to the site is not possible at the moment due 
> to technical reasons". The electronic publication claimed that NurSat, one 
> of the main Internet Service Providers in Kazakhstan, was blocking access 
> through a series of URL filters which included the site in disgrace. The 
> same day the information bulletin published on the Eurasia Web site ran as 
> follows: "In a statement made available to "RFE/RL Newsline," the Int!
>  ernet provider Nursat, which is the largest in Kazakhstan, has formally 
> denied blocking access to the Eurasia Web site maintained by the Kazakh 
> political opposition. It also affirmed that it neither condones nor 
> supports any Internet "censorship". Internews' office in Kazakhstan last 
> week quoted an unnamed Nursat technician as saying that access to the 
> Eurasia site would be impossible for an indefinite period for "technical 
> reasons" (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 9 November 1999).
> Conclusion
>
> Internet censorship turns out to be a very popular means of controlling 
> information flow in the post-Soviet environment, where the so-called 
> special services were used to directing the information and controlling 
> all of the media. Unfortunately, with the approach of the digital age, the 
> strategy of the former KGB officials does not seem to be exactly fit. 
> Almost all the impediments to free speech expression can be overcome with 
> the help of a deft technician or a 14-year-old hacker.
> Russia's approach, which includes having security officials track the 
> e-mail flow of  Internet users seems impractical. Since I am personally 
> involved in several Internet news projects and have friends dispersed 
> around the world, I receive about 150 e-mails daily, and in a year the 
> number would perhaps double. That means that in my case if the security 
> officials want to track all my Internet activity, they would need to have 
> a dedicated employee working with just my e-mail.  This seems of little 
> efficiency if you have a large number of people to track.
> Another approach, which has not been used by the KGB offspring, but surely 
> will be, is posting the filters, which recognize certain words and word 
> combinations in e-mail messages. In the US such methodology is used not 
> only by CIA or NSA, but by another triple letter agency, which we know as 
> AOL. The efficiency of this can be estimated to an even lower level, since 
> it would take only two 14-year-olds to exchange several thousands messages 
> containing the sought words daily, which would bring the tracking system 
> to a complete halt.
> Kazakhstan's solution to the problem, even being more high-tech and 
> advanced than its counterparts, has many flaws as well. Without going into 
> technical details it is quite obvious that with the proper technical 
> knowledge a person can surmount the access restrictions as well as 
> firewalls. If they can break into the FBI's Web site, they can surely pass 
> some server-side restrictions imposed by a government technician.
> And, finally, as to encryption^Å  Even if you are working with highly 
> secret messages and even if you are watched by a dozen security officials, 
> there is still a relatively easy way to transfer the message to the 
> destination. The 128-bit encryption key, which is now included in 
> Microsoft's shipment of Windows 2000, presents 2 to the power of 128 
> possibilities of the encryption key, and it can only be broken with about 
> three thousand computers picking the numbers for three years. Needless to 
> say, even the current companies, involved in the IT area, do not have the 
> capabilities of dedicating such a grand amount of hardware to solving one 
> specific problem of decrypting another e-mail message.
> Today the security services of the post-Soviet countries are trying to 
> find an enemy, which they had not expected, an enemy, which is popular and 
> welcomed in public, an enemy with the power far beyond all the security 
> services combined - and the name of the enemy is the Net.
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