Since 2011, Russia’s government body, the Kremlin, has been searching for a solution to prohibit free speech and user control on the internet. This aggression has been incited by previous protests and social movements taking place on popular social media platforms where users can speak their mind against the government. Now, in 2016, without much more workable options, Russia is taking a look at how China does things. In short, they want to build their firewall. The great firewall of Russia.
Russia’s first step in controlling the internet was to control the companies themselves. Talks began in early 2012 with companies acquiescing to Russia’s aggression, but in 2015 when the data localization was about to come into effect, progress stalled. Critics of the bill theorize that Russia was afraid companies would not obey to the terms, and in early 2016, talks were still ongoing leading into February with no visible progress.
Secondly, Russia’s emphasis and confidence in the data localization technology assumed that users would not circumvent restrictions with technologies like Tor and VPN. At the time, it was easy to see why, but three big things happened that changed the way Russian users approached the internet.
Firstly, the largest Russian torrent site, Rutracker.org was blocked which caused a huge influx of Russian users to start utilizing Tor and VPN technology to unblock their favorite torrent website. Around the same time, Russia’s research institute failed at successfully blocking Tor and VPN. Then to make things even worse for Russia censorship, Facebook allowed access for users through Tor encouraging more users to pick up the network.
Now with their proposed system of censorship failing, Russia is now trying to learn how China controls their users at a massive scale. They want to have the same sort of “digital sovereignty” –which is just another nicer way of terming absolute control over the internet and the people who use it.
Russia and China rationalize that the U.S is under the control of the web since a vast majority of websites are governed by the United States. Putin’s assistant in charge of the internet in Russia explains that “the dominance of multinational Internet companies leads to monopolization of the markets, with the state borders yet to be defined.”
Russia and China are now simultaneously working towards creating regulations that require websites to register themselves domestically. These plans are synonymous with other plans to build a nationwide whitelist that would dictate which sites can exist or not.
In order to get around these future blacklisting of websites, you will need to use a virtual private network to encrypt your traffic and mask your IP.
Russia and China still cannot block the 256-AES Stealth VPN encryption that powers TorGuard VPN. You can also access the internet and the websites you want anywhere in the world through TorGuard’s expanding network of 51+ locations over 1600 servers. Fight back against deep packet inspection and censorship techniques with TorGuard’s advanced obfuscation through stealth VPN and stealth proxy.
