Russian sovereignty is facing a new challenge of the 21st century. Experts and diplomats assure that if Western countries continue "the third stage of world colonization - digital", Russia will be forced to defend itself. For example, create your own Internet, separate from the rest of the world. How will it look and why is it so important?
Russia has all the necessary capabilities to create an alternative Internet, but will use them only in the most unfavorable scenario, Ilya Rogachev, director of the Department for New Challenges and Threats of the Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday. According to him, Moscow's policy is not aimed at isolating the Internet, but the policy of the West and the imposition of double standards may force Russia to take this path.
Earlier it was reported that Russia could submit to the UN two new initiatives - resolutions concerning the regulation of relations between countries in cybersecurity issues. As Kommersant noted, one of the resolutions will be a kind of “cyber code” - a kind of set of rules of conduct for states on the Internet, which should prohibit any interference in the internal affairs of a state via the Internet.
The second Russian resolution is intended to revise the existing system of combating cybercrime, which is defined by the 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. Recall that Moscow did not sign this convention because of Article 32 of this document, which allows various special services to obtain cross-border access to computer data without official notification.
Russia is counting on the support of these proposals by a number of BRICS, SCO and CSTO countries. However, this may not be enough for their adoption, especially given the fact that voting for these initiatives from the West is unlikely to be expected. That is why Moscow, in close cooperation with Beijing, continues to work on the so-called alternative Internet project, which the Foreign Ministry mentioned.
The idea was born back in November 2017, when, as RBC reported, the Security Council of the Russian Federation instructed the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to create in the BRICS countries their own system of DNS and ICANN root servers, which generally determine the operation of the Internet and most of which are now located in the United States. At the same time, Russian experts drew attention to the concept of the director and chief engineer of the Computer Network Control Center and Information Security Management Fang Binxing, who is called the "father of the Chinese firewall" for his contribution to the creation of the Golden Shield system. According to his proposed concept, between several BRICS countries, for example Russia and China, it is possible to create a direct data exchange bypassing the root DNS servers in the United States. The idea of an alternative internet was initially criticized for being too expensive and unnecessary. However, it was not abandoned.
This idea arose for a reason, Igor Ashmanov, managing partner of Ashmanov and Partners, explained to the VZGLYAD newspaper. Several years ago, the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media held exercises in case the country was disconnected from the Internet from the outside, he recalled. These exercises exposed not only dependence on the American DNS North (China, by the way, has already got rid of it), but also the danger of encryption certificates, which are managed by the Association of North American Accountants.
“A lot is built on these certificates, including transportation and other critical infrastructure. These certificates are in every browser, OS, registries. But to persuade Google, Microsoft and other software companies to supply Russian certificates is not so easy. The Chinese have a country certificate, but we do not,”Ashmanov said. In fact, all e-commerce is based on them. You can revoke a US certificate with one click. For example, this happened recently with the website of the Public Chamber of Russia. The Americans did not like her position on Crimea and Donbass, and they simply revoked the certificate from the site, which immediately collapsed, the source said.
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The state should have an option of autonomy, since the "Internet switch" is still in the hands of the Americans, who in all their doctrines call Russia the main enemy, Ashmanov stressed.
In addition, Ashmanov recalled that the Americans have created a gigantic tracking system on the Internet, despite the fact that in 2015 the country passed a federal law on the Freedom Act (replaced the Patriot Act), which prohibits US intelligence services from conducting electronic surveillance of American citizens. The CIA and the NSA have equipment at their disposal that "allows you to open any electronic protection on the planet and monitor any applications, operating systems, devices." In addition, the Americans have learned to leave false evidence pointing to the "supposedly Russian".
“We are dealing with an Orwellian state, where the surveillance act is called the Freedom Act. Their pursuit of surveillance causes a natural desire in any state to somehow weaken it, to stop it. Nobody likes to be watched on a national scale,”Ashmanov explained. In addition to surveillance, the Americans are developing cyber weapons to remotely disable critical infrastructure of the enemy.
There is a third reason for the development of an alternative Internet - it is the war unleashed by the Americans in cyberspace. The United States funds a huge number of propagandist trolls to participate in cyber wars, Ashmanov said. “The US uses the Internet as a loophole through which it exerts pressure on the country. This is a good reason to do your own thing while maintaining autonomy. This is a matter of maintaining sovereignty,”the source is convinced. “The main threats will come from there. I have been filtering all kinds of rubbish on the Internet for many years and have watched for many years how Kaspersky Lab works from the inside. For the past quarter century, 90% of all cyber threats, spam attacks originated from the United States,”he added.
All this leads to the desire for digital sovereignty. According to Ashmanov, in a normal situation, “most likely, no one will disconnect Russia from the Internet,” this is possible only under the scenario of a real war between the countries. “It is important for the Americans not to turn off the Internet, but to load threats through it, conduct cyber and information attacks. The American-controlled Internet is a weapon of digital colonization and aggression. Therefore, the thought that comes to the Russian government is understandable,”he said.
Zecurion CEO Alexei Raevsky considers the threat exaggerated, and disconnecting Russia from the Internet is possible only in theory. “The network can be quickly restored. There used to be a situation when the Russian segment was not connected with each other. For example, if you wanted to visit a site from Moscow that is hosted in St. Petersburg, then it is possible that the connection was established through Finland. In this case, it is not very reliable. And if some DNS servers are cut off, then this is solved by reconfiguring to local DNS servers rather quickly. There are no special problems here,”Raevsky told the VZGLYAD newspaper.
He is convinced that with the current development of the Internet, the Americans will not be able to disconnect Russia from the Internet even if they want to, they can only "screw up a little bit" “It will not work to inflict significant damage, to disable the entire economy. Yes, maybe "Gosuslugi" and other services will not work for some time. But this situation looks quite speculative,”the expert concluded. At the same time, Raevsky believes that the authorities can launch an "alternative" Internet, but the question is who will use it. “I doubt that there is a need for all this,” said Raevsky.
In turn, Ashmanov explained that this is not about creating an Internet closed from the world, but only about an independent network that will be impossible to bring down. However, this requires cooperation with other countries.
Russia has long been conducting such consultations with its Chinese partners. Cyber cooperation was spelled out in a separate clause of the agreement following the visit of President Vladimir Putin to China. Such cooperation can bring results within the BRICS as well. Brazil, for example, has a clear focus on digital sovereignty - it has a powerful import substitution program and is actively investing in the development of its own software products, Ashmanov said.
At the same time, users will not experience any difficulties, the Internet will continue to work for them. Users are more worried about the actions of the Americans, who, for example, stopped updating software for companies that fell under the sanctions. Also in Russia there have already been cases with problems when using payment systems. “There is no barrier for the US to turn off something. It is the local Western lifestyle propagandists who tell us that American companies are independent of the state. This is all not true. Gave the command - and started to disable updates. Therefore, the idea that Russia will create its own Cheburashka network, and we will not be able to know what is happening in the West, we will not be able to download content - this is all nonsense. The Internet will be available to us,”summed up Igor Ashmanov.
Andrey Rezchikov, Alexey Nechaev