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Russia To Block LinkedIn After Court Ruling on User Data (go.com)
Social network for professionals LinkedIn faces being blocked in Russia after a court ruled it broke a law on data storage. From a report on AP:Moscow city court spokeswoman Ulyana Solopova tells The Associated Press that the court rejected an appeal Thursday by LinkedIn against a district court's decision that the company had broken a law that requires personal data on Russian citizens to be stored on servers within Russia. Solopova says LinkedIn can appeal Thursday's ruling. The case was brought by Roskomnadzor, the Russian state telecommunications and media regulator.
I think the regime knows exactly what they are doing. By passing a law that is virtually impossible for most internet entities to comply with, they are creating the legal framework to strictly control information dissemination in Russia. Even better, it's couched in terms that the masses approve of in principle, such as protecting privacy from foreigners who would exploit you.
Sure there are ways to route around the damage, but those are summarily grouped under anti-terror laws.
It's a brilliant scheme, one that is becoming increasingly common across the world. And it's very pernicious and subtle. Governments can now do things that were only dreamed of years ago by dictatorships and the tin-pot kingdoms of history.
Thank goodness trump will make America great again.Oh wait, what's that? He's been in talks with the soviets since before the election? Oops.
How is this law impossible to comply with? Put some servers in Russia. That's it.
Perhaps a more concrete example might be easier to understand: If information about Russian users is stored on servers in Russia, and information about German users is stored on servers in Germany, then on whose soil shall information about interaction between Russian and German users be stored?
I'm italian. Italian government (and so do other European countries, but I know the details just for my country) are routinely blocking servers (mostly http(s) servers...So websites) for very disparate reasons in court rulings (child abuse, sexual content, defamation, infringing on copyright and registered trademarks etc.).
Those server are almost never in the country (When they happen to be in the country they just send the police to the physical location). The block is usually a simple DNS block, they force all national ISPs to make the DNS records of the blocked sites point to a specific, state operated IP address. In a few cases I know they also forced providers to pollute routing tables, but that has other technical issues so that technique is usually avoided.
All technicians know that method is not bulletproof and also judges and politicians know, but it's not a problem for them, because 99% of the users don't know how to work around such a block (and don't care enough to spend 3 minutes on it), and blocking 99% of users is more than what they need.
This applies in this case too. causing 90% or even just 75% of Russian linked in traffic to disappear could be bad enough for linkedin as a punishment.
poland
>Perhaps a more concrete example might be easier to understand: If information about Russian users is stored on servers in Russia, and information about German users is stored on servers in Germany,
Here how it was designed to work:
1. KGB knocks on Google's Moscow's office and says: you are not keeping data on dissident A, B. and C in Russia because their spooks can't find them in the data they intercept
2. Google responds that A, B, and C registered their accounts outside of Russia
3. KGB claims that they didn't and threaten Google to close them down if they keep withholding data of "Russians"
4. Google gives KGB access to a full mirror of their database including people who have nothing to do with Russia
In 2013, Google gave Russian government an SSL key from their Russian Google market server, most likely with full understanding how Russians will use it (and they thought that they will use it to spy on their own dissidents). But Russians used that SSL certificate to do MITM attacks to remotely install spyware on phones of British members of parliament in Britain. After that, Google disbanded their Russian office, only leaving some non-tech operations people in Saint Petersburg. Of course they also invalidated that individual certificate (Google market was not tied to a specific SSL cert as long as it was signed by Google).