Week 11 a.k.a. Privacy And Censorship

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."

- George Orwell, "1984"

This is Week 11 of SPEAIT2021K course and I would like to write about online censorship and privacy invasion cases.

I will start with the first one, case of online censorship. On 1st July 2017, the Yarovaya Law went into effect, which which required telecom operators to store all voice and messaging traffic of their customers for half a year, and their internet traffic for 30 days, and to store chat decryprion keys and hand them over to FSB (Federal Security Service) upon request. While most of the messengers obliged, showing no respect to user's privacy and willingness to hand over decryption keys which essentially means handing over access to all chats and personal messages, the creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov, refused to do so. He explained, that it is both technically impossible and violates constitutional rights of citizens of Russia. Then Russian government decided that the best way to deal with it was to block Telegram on the territory of the Russian Federation. This task was instructed to RosKomNadzor, who then blocked over 18 millions of IP addresses while trying to block Telegram. During that time many other services like Viber, Facebook, Oracle's Java, Google and many others were blocked while Telegram remained working. Ironically, this whole situation raised the popularity of Telegram among russian users and contributed to the raise of general knowledge about different types of encryption algorithms and VPNs and Proxies. I would also like to mention the most beautiful protest in my opinion - on 22nd april 2018 in several cities people folded and launched paper airplanes from their roofs and balconies.

Moving on to the privacy invasion case, I will discuss aforementioned Yarovaya Law, which itself  is an excellent example of such. It was meant to be an antiterrorist law, a preventive measure. The law required telecom operators to store phone calls and messages of users alongside the personal information for the period of 6 months. Additionally ISPs were required to store usernames, birthdates, addresses, full names, passport information, languages that user knows, list of relatives, contents of messages, audio- and video files, e-mail addresses, date and time of login and logout and software name. Furthermore, these data would be immediately handed over to FSB upon request. There were some other aspects, but I will not dive into it, since in my opinion what is described above is more than enough to make my pont. Implementation of such law basically denies users any rights to privacy and violates their constitutional rights.

The technology evolves and so does the censorship. In nowadays world privacy has become a luxury that people often give up themselves.