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Russia Lawmakers Pass Spying Law That Requires Encryption Backdoors, Call Surveillance (dailydot.com)
A bill that was proposed recently in the Russian Duma to make cryptographic backdoors mandatory in all messaging apps, has passed. Patrick Howell O'Neill, reports for DailyDot:A massive surveillance bill is now on its way to becoming law in Russia. The "anti-terrorism" legislation includes a vast data-eavesdropping and -retention program so that telecom and internet companies have to record and store all customer communications for six months, potentially at a multitrillion-dollar cost. Additionally, all internet firms have to provide mandatory backdoor access into encrypted communications for the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency and successor to the KGB. The bill, with support from the ruling United Russia party, passed Friday in the Duma, Russia's lower legislative house, with 277 votes for, 148 against, and one abstaining. It now moves to Russia's Federal Council and the Kremlin, where it's expected to pass into law.
Non-Russian-based companies can't be compelled to comply with this, and furthermore some companies are sure to just completely pull out of Russia completely. Apparently Russian politicians are no smarter than politicians anywhere else, and apparently are uncomprehending of the fact that the Internet is not just inside Russia or controlled by Russia.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Seems like exactly the kind of thing a corrupt government that doesn't respect the privacy and rights of its citizens would do.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Extend that concept a little to "... and Orwellian monitoring and social control", and we can talk about it.
Gilmore may have been correct... at the time he said it. But that was in an era of the net being dominated by technically astute people, rather than the Facebookian masses, who appear perfectly happy to tolerate any degree of central control and monitoring.
The internet no longer interprets these things as any sort of problem, and that allows nations like Russia, China, and many in the Middle East to use it as a tool of oppression, spying on their population, and trying to influence human behaviors. Also the US to use it as a means of constant surveillance of everyone, at all times.
So where is the "circumvention" now? It's absent. Sure, you can find the occasional neckbeard bemoaning the state of things, but those people are one in tens of thousands. Slashdotters like to say, "But GPG through TOR relays through VPNS!!!one!!" as if that is something that 99.999% of the world even understands. Face it, the voice of people wanting an open and free internet is a drop in the ocean of people who Just Don't Care, or actively Want That Control because terrorists.
So little by little, the walls close in. Each country is emboldened by the successes of the last who tried. Each step is not that big. Each little increment is tolerable. But in the end? The Internet That Was is destroyed, and the Internet That Is becomes more about being the ultimate tool of authoritarians.
I don't live in Russia. I have several Russian friends in Moscow. I am sad for them, just like they are for me RE: NSA. And we're both powerless to do much but watch.