Russia Tries To Deliver The Killing Blow To VPN Use
from the Industrialized-stupdity dept
Last year Russia passed a new surveillance bill that promised to bring greater security to the country. As is par for the course for these types of bills, the legislation did the exact opposite by not only mandating new encryption backdoors, but by also imposing harsh new data-retention requirements on ISPs and VPN providers. As a result, some VPN providers like Private Internet Access wound up leaving the country after finding their entire function eroded and having some of their servers seized. The end result? Russia's pledge to shore up security wound up making everybody in the country notably less secure.
And now Russia appears poised to dramatically up the ante.
Alongside the country's attack on encryption, Russia has dramatically ramped up internet filtering and censorship in the apparent hopes of making the great firewall of China seem reasonable. And a new bill being pushed quickly through the Russian legislature would not only impose fines of up to $12,400 per breach on search engines that still link to these banned sites, but would require VPNs to immediately cease providing access to these blocked domains as well. If they refuse, these VPN providers risk being blocked themselves:
"Russia’s plan is to issue a nationwide ban on systems and software that allow Internet users to bypass website blockades previously approved by telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor. This means that if a VPN, proxy or similar tool unblocks torrent site RuTracker, for example, it will be breaking the law. As a result, it too will find itself on Russia’s banned site list."
The technical aspects of the bill appear to have largely been formulated by the Media Communications Union (MCU), a coalition of Russian media conglomerates hoping to piggyback on the government's crack down of free speech to wage a broader war on piracy. And while the legislation's proponents continue to insist this is all simply necessary to thwart piracy and security threats at home and abroad, most are well aware that this is just pretense for a ham-fisted attempt at information control under the false banner of a safer, more secure nation:
“Naturally, we are against the spread of illegal content, but the law does not violate the rights and freedoms of citizens to access information,” says Sergey Grebennikov, director of the Regional Public Center of Internet Technologies. "Yes, there is a ‘gray zone’ used to carry out illegal activities and the distribution of illegal content using a CGI proxies, but it does not mean that legitimate users have to suffer. It is also important to note that the laws do not violate the rights of users who choose the safe use of the Internet, for example, by using a VPN connection,” Grebennikov concludes."
Those worries are a day late and several thousand dollars short. 100 VPN providers are already blocked in Russia for one reason or another, and Opera scaled back its Russian operations last November after Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor pressured it to include website filtering in the integrated VPN (now included in its Opera browser for free). This new assault on VPNs simply takes the entire affair to the next level, bringing Russia more in line with the draconian VPN crackdown we're seeing in China (and, inevitably, here in the west, where VPNs are increasingly demonized).
Of course while VPNs are not a panacea for our endlessly eroded privacy rights, they remain an incredibly useful tool for those living under repressive regimes. Most legislative VPN bans are of the "death by a thousand cuts" variety, where lawmakers go out of their way to pretend they're not trying to kill VPNs, even if the end goal always remains the same: the elimination of any tool that can protect citizens from ever-expanding government surveillance and information control.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's what the RUssian people want
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: It's what the RUssian people want
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A good year for security software engineers.
I think this ultimately bececomes a The more you tighten your grip... situation. We already have VPNs that operate covertly or with plausible deniability. Russia's sharp increase in demand will encourage newer, faster, easier--to-implement services will be forthcoming.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: A good year for security software engineers.
Nope. Flaging blackholes and instant "round them all up for disappearing" will end that delusion.
The truth is the modern internet is very easily made into a hell hole given strict enough controls. Too much of the "decentralized" network is dependent on very centralized critical links, address resolution servers, protocols, security authorities, and search engine behemoths.
Worse most of the good info, (for controlling your citizens to ever increasing degree), is being increasingly stored in the same handful of locations. Ripe for the picking. Yeah no terrorist will use it, (if they have any sense), but that's not the target of these kinds of legislation to begin with. It's just made to sound that way to please the masses.
So no, your "tighten your grip" situation is already iron clad. Now they're just moping up the spill over from the floor.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Comcast Business, Sonic, and a few others do allow servers, so you could download the open source SoftEther server, install it on your machine, and create the login and password needed.
Just be sure to open up the right ports on your router, so the VPN will work.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
See How China Blocks the Tor Anonymity Network. In summary their firewall looks at the packets for anything that looks like a Tor handshake. (In an ongoing cat-and-mouse game, the Tor developers have since tried to obfuscate the traffic in various ways.)
Open-source VPNs are much easier to detect because they're not generally written to be stealthy, just to hide the contents of the traffic. The way to get away with this is probably to run the VPN over HTTPS, with a valid HTTPS certificate on your server. You might actually need a web server there too, because the national firewalls might try to connect and request a page (and block the IP if it doesn't look like a web server--but they can't see the URL, so they won't know if you're requesting /cgi-proxy.)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
As long as they're abiding by law, they might continue to exist
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
MaidSafe - The New Decentralized Internet
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
eh
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
VPN is Russia still legal?
https://thebestvpn.com/are-vpns-legal-banned-countries/#vpnlegal-section-R
Did the law pass already or is it still in the making?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
VPN in Russia Legal or Not ?
However, i am wondering if things will change like it is in UAE where the government is taking real action against VPN users...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
@Alan - ExpressVPN is great for speed but apparently it only offers 3 simultaneous connections (according to some of the reviews https://bestvpnweb.com/expressvpn-review/ )
I have been using nordvpn which provides decent speeds
[ link to this | view in chronology ]