A conversation about cybersecurity, national interests and information warfare with a Russian entrepreneur in the field of information technology, artificial intelligence, software development, project management I. S. Ashmanov
Dmitry TARAN. Igor Stanislavovich, could you give an assessment of the state of information security in Russia? After all, you have been working in this area for more than a dozen years
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, for more than thirty years I have been doing artificial intelligence, text analysis, and so on. But I am not just an information security specialist, although for some reason they call me that on the Web. I worked a lot in this area - I was engaged in filtering various "electronic waste", but still, information security specialists are a special specialty.
As far as information security is concerned, this problem should be divided into two parts. One part of it is cyber or electronic security related to the safe operation of software, devices, channels, this is where the main threats are network attacks, bookmarks, hacks, viruses, Trojans, botnets, and so on. The second part is information security related to the impact on consciousness, with the safe functioning of minds.
From the point of view of cybersecurity, Russia, like most countries in the world, has long been a "digital colony" of the United States. But in comparison with other states, our situation is better, because we still have a lot of our own.
Dmitry TARAN. When did we fall into this colonial addiction?
Igor ASHMANOV. Except for the fateful decision of the USSR to copy a series of large machines (mainframes) IBM-360 in the early 1970s, it began en masse in the late 1980s, when many of our developments were abandoned and we began to uncritically assimilate someone else's, largely due to economic devastation and piracy. For 20-25 years, as a country, we, as a country, have not paid conditional two hundred billion dollars for licenses for Windows, Office, and so on, as a country, because we took it all for nothing, but thereby we became addicted to their software, like “on the needle”, and since then we have been using only this. And where there is no piracy, in the corporate and public sectors we pay huge sums of money for this software and hardware.
In the 1990s, in the first round of digital colonization, we "internalized" American operating systems, software, games, browsers, office applications, processors, motherboards, graphics cards, smartphones, routers. We have also mastered the Internet, which was invented by the Americans and is still controlled by them.
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Dmitry TARAN. And what structures in the US control the Internet?
Igor ASHMANOV. The first critical part of the Internet is the domain root servers, or "root servers". This part is actually still operated by the US Department of Commerce. The second part is the root encryption certificates that are used by our banks, all organizations that issue Internet passwords, and in general all sites where there is at least some kind of registration and passwords. This portion is formally administered by the North American Association of Accountants. Large Internet projects such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube are subject to the so-called Freedom Act of 2015 (formerly the Patriotic Act of 2001), which requires the transfer of all US intelligence data. That is, they are controlled by their intelligence.
Dmitry TARAN. But do they often talk about international organizations in this area?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, there are many international organizations that kind of govern the Internet, for example, ICANN. But these are purely sham structures, in my opinion, created precisely to disguise the fact that Internet governance is still in the hands of the Americans. The main role in them is played by the same Anglo-Saxons, and they are usually headed by the essential committees in these organizations.
Well, the actual control of the Internet at the level of services and applications is in the hands of the Americans: the whole world lives within the confines of several American Internet services: the Google search engine, the Facebook social network, the Twitter, Instagram and YouTube microblogs., operating system for Android smartphones, Google Play application store, smartphones with iOS …
Most countries in the world do not have a developed programming industry and are not able to develop their own search engine, or their own social network, or anything else. And even if they once had them (as in Germany or the Czech Republic), they were kicked out of the market long ago.
Russia and China in this sense are in a better position: they have their own social networks, mails, search engines, instant messengers, and so on.
Dmitry TARAN. Can we say that a new round of digital colonization has now begun?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, at a new round of digital colonization, they began to actively impose on us new technologies, just magical ones, which supposedly will change the world! Everyone has heard such words and phrases as "blockchain", "neural networks", AI, "cryptocurrency", "Internet of things", "Big data" - they are now pouring from "any iron". As in the 1990s, we are told that new technologies are very cool, very, very necessary, we need to introduce them faster, otherwise we will lag behind! And why to implement it is usually not discussed … If someone asks for an explanation, they say that we will make money on it, we will get up, we will have time to "jump on the train." And if we do not implement it, then we will lag behind for hundreds of years. Naturally, no one explains how one can lag behind in three years forever. We are already fifty, one hundred years behind, as they usually say. Back in the nineties …
In the late 90s, there was the same period of furious promotion of the Internet bubble, when everyone said: this is a new economy, it will change the world. Even the term was introduced "New Economy". And in exactly the same way they promised a lag of a hundred years, if we don't "jump on the train." Now even this term has experienced a rebirth, I have already heard it, not to mention "Economy 4.0", "6th technological order" and the like. Again, pretentious words obscure the meaning of what is happening.
Dmitry TARAN. The Millennium has shown what this "New Economy" is
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, the “bubble” of the New Economy, the “bubble” of Internet projects, the so-called “bubble of dotcoms” (Dotcom Bubble) burst just in 2000.
But not in connection with the millennium. "Millennium", as the allegedly awful software "Error-2000" that was waiting for us, was just another small "bubble" on which someone made good money, "fixing" "Error-2000".
Then, in the new century, the "bubble" of startups, mortgages and so on was inflated. A “bubble” of new digital technologies is now inflating.
And again the main motive is "quickly, quickly implement, run, jump, grab your bags - the station is leaving!" They promise to "change the world" and very big earnings.
On TV, in videos on the Web and at conferences, we see the preachers of these new technologies: usually marketers, bankers, journalists (media people) - that is, humanitarians who actually know little about technologies, but say what their assistants give them … The main motive and consequence of such a rush is the introduction of the "ready-made", because the ready-to-implement is faster. And “ready-made” is (surprise!) American! Because they have already done it, of course, because they are promoting what has already been done. So if we succumb to this "digital fever", then in five to seven years our level of penetration of foreign technologies (that is, the level of digital colonization) will significantly increase.
Dmitry TARAN. Does anyone at the state level understand this danger?
Igor ASHMANOV. We talked about this many times at high meetings. Both me and my wife Natalya Kasperskaya participated in various working groups on the digital economy, including on the topic of import substitution. We are not the only ones who talk about this, the topic of import substitution is now on the buzz.
I think that those responsible for digitalization in our country understand this.
But there are very influential people who constantly make noise about the rapid introduction of new technologies. From my point of view, this is either stupidity or bias. If techies or figures of this market are promoting a conditional blockchain or cryptocurrencies in the media, then everything is clear with them: they want to "rise" and become the first in the market. This is an understandable private interest. But the officials who manage the country's long-term plans need to be more circumspect and cautious.
Dmitry TARAN. But are there others who can be called agents?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, by conscious or unconscious agents of influence.
Let's take a look at an example with a cryptocurrency. But first, I'll tell you a personal story to explain the mechanism. My father was a professional mathematician, Ph. D., the author of many works in mathematical economics. He worked as the scientific secretary of the Department of Operations Research at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University, including reading the data of the State Planning Committee of the USSR (together with well-known fellow economists Nit and Medvedev).
In 1988, I somehow came to him and said that we have now made a spelling checker program, we are selling it mainly to government organizations, I have money. Maybe it makes sense for me to pay early for a housing cooperative and close the question? I was then 26 years old, I recently graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, I was engaged in programming, but I did not think about big questions. And my father said that there was no need to pay anything ahead of schedule, because soon this money would not cost anything.
It completely amazed me, because there was no inflation at that time. I asked my father why? Because, he said, the Soviet Union had built a powerful dam between cash and non-cash money. These were different types of money. The non-cash money used by the enterprises was practically impossible to turn into cash. This happened only through the "gateways" of salaries and bonuses, under close supervision, the OBKHSS, the KGB and other organizations monitored this. And now, my father told me, a breach has been made in this dam in the form of centers of scientific and technical youth creativity (STTM) and other methods of “cash out” (in which, as we remember, future oligarchs like Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky labored). In fact, under the guise of "New Economy", "cooperatives", powerful offices were created for "cash out", and my father believedthat this hole will wash away the entire dam, and the entire economy of the Soviet Union will be pulled into the formed tectonic funnel.
Therefore, he advised me not to pay anything ahead of schedule, but to buy something useful: an apartment or household appliances, because after a while the ruble will not cost anything.
Dmitry TARAN. These predictions came true …
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes. The Soviet Union was being destroyed quite deliberately and in many different ways. For example, in the same years, all duties on the export of goods from the Soviet Union were removed, and many goods disappeared from us, because they were several times cheaper than Western goods of the same quality. They took out shoes, washing powders and so on in wagons …
Dmitry TARAN. That is, another "hole" was punched through the border?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, and this deliberate collapse of money circulation and the economy gobbled up everything that people had accumulated. This enriched the first oligarchs and allowed the USSR to declare a false (imitation) "default".
So, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, in my opinion, is exactly the same possible hole in the country's economic sovereignty. This is, in fact, "black cash" without a control system, which, as it were, does not belong to anyone, it seems to be global. It is an opportunity to cash out in a way that no one can control at all. If we introduce this, the entire Russian economy will be sucked in there. That is why this “black cash” on a global scale was invented by the Americans - to destroy other people's economic systems.
For a better understanding of where this black kryptonal is going, it is worth looking at the world statistics of transactions in bitcoin (there are reports, analytics) - there more than 90% goes to drugs, weapons, prostitution, child porn and the like. And it is understandable why it was there that black dealers rushed from the gray zones: this is the most convenient option for uncontrolled operations.
In addition, this is a global thing, because bitcoin is accepted all over the world, you no longer need to think about where dollars, pounds and so on will be taken or not.
All this, in my opinion, is an economic sabotage of a huge scale, and if our people dump the fool and decide that we need to be ahead of the rest of the planet, this will come to us with all irreversible consequences.
Dmitry TARAN. So far, fortunately, we do not have cryptocurrency, but much more is already being implemented …
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, for example, the Internet of Things. It would seem that it is good when sensors are installed on all devices, allowing you to control production, energy, transport or home appliances, but the problem is that there is no national standard for these sensors and data transfer protocols within the country. We borrow again. Both the sensors and the servers that process them are mainly produced in the West.
We are already vulnerable: our industrial process control systems (production control systems) operate on Western technologies and are controlled by Western software. We practically do not have our own APCS systems.
Imagine: the management of blast furnaces, power plants, rolling mills, drilling stations, pipelines - we have Western production. Again the same thing: it was necessary faster, it was already ready, Western and our investors demanded the installation of systems known to them from well-known Western manufacturers - and there was a 100% digital colonization of industrial management.
Almost all of these systems are cloud-based, that is, they download updates every day, and whoever sold these systems to us most likely sees what, how and how much we produce. Including some defense enterprises.
Dmitry TARAN. And the collapse of the entire system can be triggered at the snap of our fingers?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes. And it doesn't cost us anything to turn off the entire Internet. In the summer of 2014, the Ministry of Communications conducted exercises to turn off our Internet from the outside. It was a closed exercise, a secret report, only general results were released to the press: what, they say, in general, we can handle it, if that. Then there were the same exercises a year ago, in December 2017. With the participation of private companies: Kaspersky Labs, Positive Technologies, Rostelecom and others. Again, a closed report was made to the Security Council and the President. It seems that the conclusion was that if anything, we can handle it.
But this conclusion is very narrow. It is valid for very limited conditions, because, for example, I think no one has checked the situation in which encryption certificates are revoked from the outside simultaneously with disabling Internet routing. If you recall them, and this is very easy to do in a few hours, then everything will stop: banking systems will stop, all sites that work on HTTPS will stop working, including Yandex, Mail. Ru, instant messengers, and so on.
Dmitry TARAN. Is the Mir card also a Western product?
Igor ASHMANOV. No, this is our card, it uses the gost encryption algorithm, as far as I know, but this is a state project. And the same Sberbank, Alfa-Bank and other large banks, I suppose, "sit" on Western encryption.
In addition, we have almost 100% of Western hardware, and these are processors, routers on the Internet, and so on. What "bookmarks" there are, what means of remote control - very few people know. Certainly, some critical application systems are tested, but not all. Now, however, they are beginning to replace with Chinese routers, servers, and this is more correct.
Dmitry TARAN. Don't we produce our own hardware?
Igor ASHMANOV. Almost not. We have two or three good processors, the main of which is Elbrus. It is clear that in the defense complex everything works on them, but we do not have factories where processors are made. That is, the "architecture" of their own processors is developed (or licensed) here, and everything is still done in Taiwan or China.
We have software routers, for example. That is, something is being done, of course.
But the most interesting consideration here is that while there is no "hot" military conflict with the US and NATO (when everything is cut down at once), no one needs an external shutdown of our Internet.
The most successful digital colonization occurs not when there is no signal in the channel, but, on the contrary, when there is a signal in the channel, when the Internet is working. When those who control its content from the outside are able to reprogram, reflash their brains, impose "soft power".
This is more or less known, no one is hiding anything: most of the color revolutions were made using the Internet, the entire Arab Spring, events in Armenia, and so on.
The new US National Cyber Strategy, published a month ago, explicitly states: the open public Internet is a means of promoting American values around the planet, and if someone from the enemies of the United States, "authoritarian regimes", hiding behind a false notion of sovereignty or information security, will restrict the Internet on our territory, we will punish him with both cyber means and conventional tools: politics, economics and war.
Our military usually speaks of the United States as a potential enemy, because they are not yet at war with it (our president generally calls them “our partners”), and on the Internet and in the information space in general, there is a real, not potential enemy. This is a hardened enemy who is striking blows right now, this war is always hot. The information war goes on day and night, it has no rules, it is not regulated by international laws, it cannot be complained about to the UN, it cannot be stopped and compensation can be demanded. It always goes on, you can either win it or lose it.
Dmitry TARAN. Can we, in the conditions of this war, at least theoretically switch to our hardware, to our software, to our Internet?
Igor ASHMANOV. First of all, you need will and, in my opinion, this will already exists. Previously, the top officials were not very interested in this process, because there were many foreign policy problems, it was necessary to re-equip the troops, and so on. Geopolitics was in focus.
Now the authorities have paid attention to cyberspace, a cyber command has been created in our army.
There is the Digital Economy program, which has five working groups. My wife leads the cybersecurity team, and I was the head of the subgroup on personal rights in the digital economy (in the Information Security direction). In principle, the words there were all correct: what import substitution is needed and what money should be allocated for it. It seems that both the command has been given, and the will is there, but how quickly it will develop is still difficult to say.
The "Bokova and Klishas' bill" that caused a lot of noise has just been submitted to the State Duma, stating that we need to ensure the stability of the Runet when it is turned off from the outside, as well as that we need to introduce a content filtering system based on traffic prints, and to supply it to operators at public expense and remove from providers responsibility for blocking, which will now be done centrally. Let's see what the bill is transformed into when passing the second and third readings.
Dmitry TARAN. They can also sabotage quietly
Igor ASHMANOV. I don't think so … Our industry really wants to develop its own, people make their own routers, processors, chips. If they are given tens or hundreds of billions of rubles needed for this, they will only be happy to develop all this. No market will give them this money, the market is busy, protectionism is not included in our country. Import substitution of this scale is a matter for the state.
But this money should be written out and given out by someone, while our "liberal bloc" in the government, with a budget surplus, still does not let money into the real sector of import substitution, but "accumulates reserves."
But we are a sovereign state, we have our own printing press, and we can issue as many rubles as we like. And, in my opinion, contrary to what the adherents of monetarism are constantly telling us, this will not lead to any inflation. If you immediately invest in real projects, if you close the hole where government money turns into cash and take them out to London / Chicago, if you pay salaries for building something, launching something, then there will be no serious inflation.
Dmitry TARAN. Money is the blood of the economy, it should be spinning, but our economy is now bled
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, we have anemic economy, we do not have enough money. We need economy-saving projects on a national scale, where huge amounts of money are spent, for example, a multi-lane autobahn from Kaliningrad to the Far East, a Martian project - anything that takes all the concrete, gasoline, all the personnel. This money will then flow from purchases and salaries into the sphere of consumption, create demand and improve the economy. We need to employ cadres with useful work, increase the paying capacity of the population; we need to produce and pay money for smart, positive, developing country activities.
It's good that we have an excellent nuclear industry, missile industry, defense industry, agriculture (thanks to the sanctions), but we need to develop the rest as well.
Dmitry TARAN. So they want to develop the "digital economy" …
Igor ASHMANOV. The Digital Economy program has a large section on information security in terms of content - content. And in this regard, the liberal "block of thought" is still quite a hindrance. To give an example: the last two years, we have been doing a lot of destructive behavior of adolescents on social networks. They studied, the reports were sent to whomever they should. Thus, as far as I can tell, they helped prevent several school shootings, which were planned for April 20, 2018 - on the anniversary of the shooting at Columbine School and Hitler's birthday.
But until now, for some reason, social networks and search engines are not responsible for the obviously dangerous, harmful, dirty content. We have no law on this.
Irina Yarovaya passed a law on suicidal content a long time ago, which speaks of information that threatens the lives of children, but this information does not include school shootings, violence, AUE, drug propaganda, and the like.
In November 2018, a new bill was introduced in the State Duma, expanding the concept of content that threatens the lives of children. Let's see what his fate will be in the winter session of the State Duma in 2019.
And when you speak publicly about the need to filter toxic, destructive content, our liberals are extremely excited and ardently object that this is totalitarianism, that it is horror when they are imprisoned for re-posts, for "likes", that even if drugs, AUE and so on on the Internet, freedom, but you just need to teach children to distinguish nasty things and independently filter the consumption of content.
In this sense, our "liberal bloc" is very wide: a large number of officials are still afraid that they will be called not democrats, stranglers of freedom, "derzhimordami" and so on. And when it comes to filtering the Internet, adopting laws that would allow the moderators of these groups to be judged for the creation of groups on school shootings on social networks, everyone is afraid to take responsibility.
Dmitry TARAN. Are they afraid or are they not ordered by those who promoted them to these posts?
Igor ASHMANOV. I don’t think so. In such positions, where it is possible to prevent the adoption of the law, people are quite independent, but they want to be built into Western civilization. And not because their children study there, although this also happens, and not because they have assets, deposits, villas, yachts, citizenship there (which also happens), but simply because they generally want to be Europeans.
There is also a huge number of people who, as it were, pose as "statesmen and patriots" during working hours, and at the same time have absolutely Western views: they like Western films, cars, music, clothes, books, travel, food … For them, real culture, civilization, interests - there; but here, in a place with a bad climate and "cattle-people", you just have to earn money, pretend to be loyal.
Dmitry TARAN. Their heart is in the West …
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, it seems to them that everything is cool in the West, but not very much here. They have a split mind, and whenever the question arises, what did you do to protect the Motherland - even if in an informational sense - these people either hesitate or deliberately interfere.
These are agents of influence, to which, perhaps, no one made a recruiting approach, but they were subdued by the "soft power" of the West. Moreover, it is clear that the real West is not arranged like the Hollywood picture, but nevertheless these people were once "re-asked" by one means or another, and now they are often the ones who decide what and how should be in our country.
Dmitry TARAN. In addition to these people, we have specialists who produce content for social networks, psychologists who develop algorithms for approaching a child according to Western patterns: which picture to show, which movie, and so on …
Igor ASHMANOV. I am not a great specialist in content suggestion and gamification techniques, but at Kribrum we have people who know how everything is organized in the West: there are dozens of information warfare organizations that are very well funded.
In the USA, of course, they know how to work, but over the past 30 years, being the only owners on the planet, they have relaxed a little. Their generation of serious Sovietologists has practically died out or retired, and they still cannot understand who Putin is, why he does not obey them, although what methods of pressure were used against him: propaganda, military, and diplomatic, and economic sense. They are used to the fact that the pressure method has always paid off for the last 30 years: you press for a while, increase the pressure, then the “patient” agrees to everything.
It won't work for us, I guess. And here our “partners” have a cognitive gap.
Dmitry TARAN. Can we, on the basis of private companies, create a forerunner for training those very specialists in the information war who can counteract what is happening in social networks with the younger generation?
Igor ASHMANOV. Private companies will not do anything here, and there is no need to give them money. There are programmers and managers who are mostly liberal in their views. Yes, sometimes they understand that they need to work for the country, but in general they have different interests. The government should be responsible for the ideology, not private companies.
We tried to build an analogue of Silicon Valley for quite a long time. But we must understand that this American model of innovation is built on the casino principle. Very few win there, and they often win due to some hidden leverage (as happens in a regular casino), and not at all on the open market. The rest come out of there with their pockets turned out, paying with their money those few who win. And this casino works exclusively next to the machine that prints the world currency. Nowhere in the world has such a venture casino been repeated, although many have tried. And we announced that we are building our "Silicon Valley" in various forms, including in Skolkovo.
We had government venture funds that gave startups government money and demanded venture capital business and monetization from them. But demanding business payback for government money is ridiculous, and it didn't work. The result was a factory for the production of projects and personnel for the American Silicon Valley: startups came to the venture capital fund with an “idea” (usually a copy of a Western project), received a Russian state grant, with this money they “packed” and left for the United States with their team - to resell project on Google and other buyers.
The startups themselves, of course, feel good …
Dmitry TARAN. What attracted them there?
Igor ASHMANOV. There is orders of magnitude more money, there is a great climate, crazy parties, food cult, affordable drugs and sex. There a programmer receives 100-200 thousand dollars a year, that is, 700-800 thousand rubles a month, this is 3-4 times more than in Moscow in the coolest company with the same qualifications. Yes, the costs of housing, taxes, kindergartens and nannies are proportionally higher, but this is not visible from here.
Therefore, I believe that our innovation model should not be monetary, because if some startups want to make money, they will always look to the West, because there is guaranteed more money there. Our market for Internet projects and software is only 2% of the world market. Yes, you can, of course, create gigantic IT companies in our country, which will become big on the world market. I directly observed such a process up close when my wife made Kaspersky Lab a billion dollar company, but this is a rare case of a successful product and a successful business strategy, a purely commercial story, in which there were no investments, no government money.
Dmitry TARAN. Should the basic innovation model be different?
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, it should be ruled from above by the state, because, firstly, we have always had it that way, and secondly, even today in China, for example, the state decides what is needed, what will be in demand in the next decade, and maybe, and centuries. They manage government money correctly. And South Korea? Samsung has long overtaken Apple - not in terms of capitalization, of course, since such a tool as capitalization is in the hands of the Americans who run the exchange, but in terms of the quality of products, the number of models, and sales.
Now the Chinese company Huawei has entered the smartphone market. It has released a super smartphone that can be bought for half the price of an iPhone. This is because the innovation model in Samsung and Huawei is completely different: they first decide what is needed and invest money, but not for the sake of monetization (this will come by itself), but in order for this thing to work and be the best.
Dmitry TARAN. This is such a Stalinist ideological model
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes. The state says: the troops need such and such a front-line bomber, who undertakes to do it? Three KB say we take it. Okay, we are giving everyone funds for a pilot project. Everybody does, they present their products. All products fly, but this particular one flies better. Okay, let's take it, you get government awards and budget for serial production. The rest - thanks! I think this is how they operate in China. They have a huge duplication of projects there and state administration from above.
And on the stock exchange, shares of huge Chinese IT companies are traded, largely fake ones, which look like private ones. They have everything as real: the billionaire founder at the head, stocks on the stock exchange, sales, materials for investors, public reporting.
Dmitry TARAN. But, in fact, they are connected to state resources
Igor ASHMANOV. Of course, every Chinese company has a first department, party committee and all that.
Dmitry TARAN. I read that the General Staff of the People's Army of China deals not only with military development, but also stands above the Ministry of Finance in matters of issuing the first and second rounds of money circulation. The military is involved in both symbols and school programs, preparing the younger generation in the future until 2045. Maybe we should also take this path?
Igor ASHMANOV. I do not suggest doing everything like the Chinese. They are different. They have their own problems and tasks. Moreover, they did not abandon Marxism as we do (and therefore regard us as failures). The main "trick" of the Chinese is that they did not allow themselves to be fooled by Western liberalism and are firmly going their own way, well understanding their own national interests. This is definitely worth adopting.
But I believe that at least the fight against information attacks should be the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense. Why? First, the military is not so media addicted, they are not afraid of either sanctions, or that they will be banned from traveling to Europe, or that someone will publicly call them non-democrats.
Secondly, they already have an understanding that they are fighting. And ask someone in an ordinary ministry, they will immediately say: why should we have a military order here? We have the same world!
And the Ministry of Defense is at war: they see the coffins coming, they understand that there is an adversary who is conducting information attacks. A center for monitoring information attacks and countering them should be at the Ministry of Defense. And, of course, there should be a model of innovation of its own. It should be remembered that the majority of American IT technologies were born inside their Defense Department or special services. The Internet was made by the US Department of Defense DARPA, then it was called ARPANET, that is, it was the military Internet, created for uninterrupted communication in the face of a nuclear strike. The Internet provided a distribution of messages that could "go" in different ways, and this guaranteed communication in case some nodes were turned off during a nuclear war.
Another example is TOR or "black Internet", in which you can "walk" anonymously. Nobody hides that this technology was created to communicate with American intelligence officers in different countries. But then they realized that the traffic would be visible, and decided to "make noise" the channel. To do this, they invited Chinese dissidents who are fighting for the secession of Tibet, the Falun Gong sect (recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation) and so on. There were a lot of Chinese people there, the channel was "noisy", and now the organizers feel good. And the fact that there were immediately divorced drugs, child porn, ordering murders - they do not really care. Also with cryptocurrencies - as soon as it became possible to pay anonymously, criminals appeared on the platform.
This is the classic American way of developing some technology with defense / intelligence money, and then privatizing it and releasing it to the public. This was the case with the Internet, with the TOR software, with mobile communications and, of course, with bitcoin. Bitcoin is the development of intelligence services for the rapid transfer of money between friendly intelligence services of different countries. Then it was released to the public, ordinary people were packed in, and this is very convenient, because the process is still under the control of Western special services.
Dmitry TARAN. Do we have any chance of an information war?
Igor ASHMANOV. There are chances, but this requires solving several problems. First, we need to ensure real import substitution so that we control digital devices and flows in our country ourselves.
Second, we need an ideology. This ideology needs to be implemented starting from school, we need a single history textbook. It is necessary to prohibit grudging one's own history, it is necessary to protect the information space. Including control of films and books. Let not by preliminary censorship (which is prohibited by our Constitution), but by the distribution of the budgets of the Ministry of Culture, the issuance of rental certificates, and so on. We must stop being afraid that someone will call us a heretic who has fallen away from the "church of liberalism" in Washington. We have already disappeared, and they are doing quite badly, the liberal model of the world is crumbling, you can no longer look back at them.
But we still have many history textbooks, some of which are very bad. Until now, our "creators" are untouchable, even if he stole grant money or tried to blow up something in Crimea; all media circles begin to defend him, because he is a creative person, there is a special demand for him, and so on (in fact - because “ours”, a member of the “kreakliata” media community). Now, however, the Ministry of Culture sometimes does not issue a rental certificate for films mocking our history, which is already good.
Dmitry TARAN. And money for such films is still allocated
Igor ASHMANOV. Yes, until recently they gave money for absolutely false, Russophobic propaganda films. I don't know what now. We will learn from the next premieres!
It is clear that it is necessary to clear up the information space in one way or another, because if everything goes well with conventional weapons, and the information space remains the same filthy, no weapon will help. Information attacks are aimed at young people in order to incite them against our own state, and if we do not cope with this, nothing will save us. The essence of the information war is the transformation of the population into a weapon against their own state.
We now have an open "information wound". Mechanical cleaning of dirt, disinfection, antibiotic treatment, sowing with useful flora is required. The authorities, I hope, understand this. So we have all the chances, we are strong in many areas: in the military field, atomic physics, engineering, and we are also doing well with programmers.
We must stop remaining a factory of free personnel for the United States, urgently stop this practice when we train mathematicians and engineers for free or very cheaply, and then they are sucked out to the West, because recruiting agencies are in every science department. They need to be thrown out of there, because they are pushing to emigrate, persuading the young man, promising him all the best in the conventional Valley.
In general, as I said above, state will is needed, an understanding that we are at war, we must stop being afraid that some liberal group will call you not a democrat.
Interviewed by Dmitry Taran