Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company's chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

In all, 26 internet addresses were blocked by the order, including several servers used to scramble the final connection for users of Tor, an anonymity network popular for circumventing censorship. Internet providers were told to implement the block "immediately," using a technique known as BGP blackholing, a way that tells internet routers to simply throw away internet traffic rather than routing it to its destination. But the company says while the site still loads, users cannot send or receive email. The way the KGB blocked ProtonMail is "particularly sneaky," ProtonMail chief executive Andy Yen said. "ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."

"That's because the two ProtonMail servers listed by the order are its back-end mail delivery servers, rather than the front-end website that runs on a different system," adds TechCrunch.

Comments

It's OK.

[DogDude]

It's OK. Putin said it was fine. He's the best!

- Donnie

Re:It's OK.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let me help you with that, your money looks so dirty... why not help yourself to a 50 million dollar condo in Florida or some shit, right? We're all mobsters here, am I right? No collusion! Loool!"

Re:It's OK.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Donnie is too busy sucking Putin's tiny wee wee 24 x 7 x 365.

Re: It's OK.

[TigerPlish]

Kennedy was wrong. We should fear more than fear itself. We should fear the idiots building world destroying new technology because they are too stupid or too greedy....or both....to see how it could possibly be used to negatively impact the world.

That was Roosevelt, not Kennedy. FFS.

And the same exact argument was made against the atom bomb.

We should not fear "the idiots building world destroying new technology." Engage them. Or don't use their services. Or educate people as to their dangers.

Fearing them implies one will cower and do nothing. Are you a coward?

that seems dumb

[c6gunner]

"ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."

So, basically, Russians can still send and recieve encrypted email no problem .... they just can't send it to Russian mail servers.

Wtf is the point of that? Trying to drive their own email providers out of business? Or is it just a really silly oversight?

Re:that seems dumb

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

The point is, of course, to attack the weakest link first, just like in the West, the authorities dealt with the "IP theft" service providers first, because it is a lot easier, as they are public, and on their own.

What will happen is that the Russians who don't care about encryption (the majority) will move on to government-sanctioned providers who work. The ability of the rest are not a concern for the Russian government. They will either move to a more "personal" solution, which will make them easier to identify and pressure, or give up, which I presume is also fine.

Re:that seems dumb

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

It was Putin who inserted all these commas, I swear.

Re:that seems dumb

[AHuxley]

Re 'Wtf is the point of that?"
What can Russia do about encrypted providers well out side any network that can be seen?
Send over an internationally accepted court request and wait for a real ip to be uncovered and sent back?
Ask police in another nation to investigate? What other nation?
Find the nation with that ip range and ask police to investigate?
The really simple way around this is to make the person change email providers.

Re:that seems dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everything is about you.

A lot of Russias "external" politics is just the internal politics leaking.
If Putin retires he will be murdered and his assets taken by someone else.
He has also bled the country dry so he needs to constantly deflect and project.
The war in Ukraine wasn't caused by some international conflict, it was just that Putin needed an external enemy to unite against.

His opposition being able to communicate freely is a problem for him. That is why he is working to make Russian internet more like the Chinese one.
He wants to limit outside communication so that Russians don't get too much news and ideas from the west and he wants to make sure that people who are in Russia can't communicate without him listening in.

If you want to send encrypted e-mails to your buddies then fine.
Heck, you can even scheme about murdering Putin if you want to, he doesn't care. You aren't a threat to him.

Re:that seems dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

My god the clue was staring us in the face the whole time!

Putin....Put in. As in he puts in commas

Re:that seems dumb

[jon3k]

If Putin retires he will be murdered and his assets taken by someone else.

Solution is simple. First, you find a successor. Someone who you generally trust from your inner circle. Then, you enter into a highly illegal act with this person, covertly. Both of you retain evidence of this event. Now you retire. If anything happens to you or your family, the information is released publicly. Then, you give your successor no good reason to go after you. When you can, you offer public support for them, but basically just lay low and enjoy retirement. Nothing to gain from killing you and lots to lose.

I didn't make this up, it was the same process Yeltsin used with Putin.

Re:that seems dumb

[LostMyAccount]

The think the Russians can point to a lot of counterfactual experience where this didn't work so well. They managed to take down Beria in spite of all his power and influence, Khruschev lived as a virtual prisoner after being deposed.

The best retirement plan is probably negotiating some kind of political asylum in a third country. Build a giant condo project in Brazil under some kind of corporate front, and then move into the top 5 floors as some kind of high-rise secure compound. Cut a deal with the host country to stay put and out of politics completely.

You're still a virtual prisoner, but at least in a cell of your own construction.

Re:that seems dumb

[PrimaryConsult]

Such a commanist thing to do!

The way the KGB blocked?

[AHuxley]

Is it still 1991?

Re:The way the KGB blocked?

[mattOzan]

The way the KGB blocked? Is it still 1991?

They meant "the former KGB," now the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The KGB ceased to exist, at least in name, in 1991.

Re:The way the KGB blocked?

[benjfowler]

De jure, no.

De facto -- yes, and they're back with a brutal vengeance. They've effectively taken over Russia in conjunction with the Russian mafia to create a monstrous intelligence-gangster state, the likes the world has never seen.

Email is just a bad protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

All the open protocols (web, email, news) are relics from the internet's academic roots.
We're going to need new protocols hardened against increasingly illiberal western states. ...Secure open protocols ...Widely adopted

Yeah, the internet is fucking toast. It was nice while it lasted.

Re:tor

[AHuxley]

FBI is not stopped by anonymous communication attempts.
Russia can send formal request to FBI about its success when needing to uncover layers of proxy communication.
FBI can give name of company they use.
Russia contacts same company and gets same support deal.

Cool, I could go to Russia or China then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I have an unlimited number of backdoored cipher & hashing algorithms, and these governments would actually value my work.

Then we just stage some stunt claiming that NSA has backdoored RSA, etc. NIST ciphers and hashes -- or simply demonstrate the proof that prime numbers leave signatures of their harmonic footprint in the modulo bit field, and all such crypto is now useless. And then introduce a new cipher standard with new backdoors in place. Then all the plebs can go back to thinking their shit is secure -- like they do now, since they don't know the trick of how prime numbers were the weakness in their previous cipher standards.

Putin has said we should place a backdoor in the encryption ciphers if it isn't too much of a burden. Today's encryption systems are all weak against some interesting tricks I know (and have been for the duration of their use), might as well be considered to have backdoors AFAICT. So put down all the bullshit arguments about "if you put in a backdoor, then bad guys will get them too". First off, you don't know shit about the surveillance system, we can find those guys before they spill the beans. Secondly, your shit is already backdoored, I mean, you even wait until NSA has tweaked (weakened / backdoored) the algorithms you use before NIST approves them and they become industry standard -- so fuck of with those pointless arguments, your shit's is fucked, and you don't care about privacy or else you'd be more interested in the use of Radar to track everything everywhere always.

more than that

[roman_mir]

Russian parliament passed new laws to punish people for 'spreading fake news' and for insulting government officials, national symbols, history, etc.

Basically it is now illegal to do any investigative journalism based on this law because the moment you say anything about anything you can be immediately, based on a complaint from anybody actually, without any court order (no court order will be required even though in Russia courts are completely useless, bought and paid for, under complete 100% control of the government and of putin) be blocked, fined, thrown to prison.

No court order is required and the information can (and must be) immediately blocked (by all local Russian ISPs), no court order is required and a person can be fined (there is a progressive scale of fines, repeat offenders also get higher and higher fines), no court order is required but a person can be thrown into prison.

The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.

Re:more than that

[serviscope_minor]

Well it may have technically been legal before, but journalists have had a habit of accidentally leaping of high balconies of hotels they never even visited. The 7.62mm holes were caused when glorious agents of the <s>KGB</s>FSB valiantly tried to save them.

Re:more than that

[cascadingstylesheet]

Thank God we aren't falling for that "need to regulate fake news" stuff here in the West!

Re:more than that

[jwymanm]

We don't have to fight Russia. It's just going to destroy itself apparently.

Re:more than that

[rhodium_mir]

bought and paid for, under complete 100% control

Yes, when you buy something you also get control over it. Anything else is theft.

Re:more than that

[damn_registrars]

The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.

When you are thousands of miles away from any place where a law you disagree with can be enforced, it is really easy to encourage people to disregard it. When you have actual skin in the game and your own future is on the line, it becomes a totally different matter. Maybe you should instead be encouraging people to do something that you would actually be willing to do yourself if you were in their shoes.

Re:more than that

[rhodium_mir]

Markets are efficient. Period. If it was more efficient for someone else to own the courts then someone else would have bought them by now.

Re:more than that

[q4Fry]

Also former government aides who repeatedly fall down while intoxicated until they die of a broken neck in a Washington DC hotel room.

Re:"Donnie" has a funny way of showing that

[93 Escort Wagon]

"He just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be."

A Great Tribute for ProtonMail

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russian intelligence services in general and Vladimir Putin in particular are no strangers to best practices of security. They have blocked ProtonMail because they know that it's cryptographically secure and they have little chance of compromising the physical security of the servers in Switzerland, which are located in a underground ex-military bunker. This should be taken as evidence that ProtonMail security is genuine and indeed a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

Re:ooga booga

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a lot of anti-semitism still in Russia. It's a very backward country.

consequences

[Cederic]

In other news, Proton Mail users are enjoying surprisingly lower rates of spam this morning.

Email Threats Sent to Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

If the police were able to read the threats were those emails actually encrypted and the encryption broken by the police?

Fast moving towards North Korea

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

A crackdown on the open Internet in Russia continues unabated. Soon, RosKomNadzor will introduce state issued mandatory SSL certificates for opening websites and forbid all the instant messengers which sport unbreakable encryption. Yes, they failed banning Telegram but it was only because there's no law to deal with fast moving targets - Durov revamped the entire servers network and logging in process to allow the Russians to communicate past the prohibition introduced last year.

It's the fourth such news piece in the last several months. Also most western media neglected the protests in regard to the Internet in Russia which happened just two days ago. It's still astonishing how few people participated. Looks like Putin has truly become the Tsar of The Grand Duchy of Moscow and the people are content with each atrocity he does. A dictator, a tyrant, Godfather of the Russian mafia state.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[JaredOfEuropa]

It's still astonishing how few people participated

Because most people don’t give a crap about privacy, or think that encryption is for criminals only. “I have nothing to hide”. And those people are often not against a little censorship either, of course only terrorism and kiddie porn at first, then regular porn, then populist agitators (or the opposition, as the case may be). Then degenerate culture. And so on. That’s not just how it works in Russia, much of Europe is the same.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[Bert64]

Although the prevalence of embarrassing data leaks seems to be waking some people up to the importance of privacy and security...

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[loonycyborg]

Putin is just a figurehead rubberstamping all this insanity. Only dumb people need one, particular person to rally against, thus any anti-Putin propaganda is by definition exists to manipulate dumb people. Nobody with good intentions would ever use dumb and misinformed people as agent of change. It only creates more chaos. As such anti-Putin rhetoric can't be used for promoting net freedom in Russia. People who would buy it would by definition not care about Internet and other nerdery like that.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

someone who knows very little about Russia besides a few western-liberal headlines

Or maybe I live in this country and know a little bit more than you could imagine by reading God knows what. Have you ever been to Russia, mr. guacamole? I really doubt that. Maybe you can understand the Russian language? Also unlikely. Maybe you've got a first person account of the state of corruption, lawlessness (to be precise we have law but it mostly serve the very rich and the members of the distinct dacha housing cooperative), decay in the country? I presume no. So, what do you really know about Russia? I'm quite sure nothing really aside from what you chose to believe in.

Have you ever watched the disclosures in regard to the inner Putin circle?

I'll just leave you with this.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Also, have a look at the state of corruption in the country as seen by its own citizens. And that was in 2009. As of 2019 the situation is a even worse.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[guacamole]

I called you out for your deception for making tall tale statements and then linking to a bunch of irrelevant ENGLISH wiki articles as proof but you only reply with a bunch of drivel including links to other bunch of websites, and also with pompous claims about where you live and what languages you know. Yes, we know Russia is very corrupt. We know its rank in the corruption index. This still does not justify stupid statements with a bunch of Wikipedia links that not even superficially prove what you said. I could mention but you would say I got it from google translate.

Re:Fast moving towards North Korea

[guacamole]

I never questioned that Russia was not corrupt. Russia was corrupt for the whole of its history since the foundation by the viking nobility a thousand years ago, with perhaps the exception of a brief period of Stalin rule when a peasant was sent to GULAG for stealing a potato from state farm. That Russia is corrupt and that Putin's buddies are rich and getting richer was never a secret. After all, Putin was appointed by corruptioner-in-law and very authoritarian Mr Yeltsin (who is strangely remembered by western libel-democrats as some kind of democratic freedom fighter and reformist despite shelling his own parliament in 1993). The difference between Yeltsin and Putin was that Putin allowed only his loyalists to rob the country while Yeltsin also allowed foreigners (e.g. the well documented case of the Harvard economics professors Larry Summers and Andrei Shleifer) But the rest of your statements were complete BS.

KGB of all things

[guacamole]

Obviously, the goal here to make a link between FSB and the soviet era KGB, just in case if there are people who don't think that FSB is not evil enough. I don't understand why this is necessary considering that FSB has built itself a pretty fearsome reputation in the post-Soviet era. I think that constantly pointing out that FSB is the new KGB is stupid. For one, KGB combined both foreign and domestic intelligence functions of USSR, while FSB is primarily a domestic intelligence agency (the Russian agency for foreign intelligence is SVR and GRU). While some functions between FSB and SVR overlap, it is mostly the people inside of Russia who should fear FSB. Another major difference between soviet KGB and Russian FSB is the extent of corruption inside FSB which is rumored to be involved in all sorts of malicious activity like extortion racket, taxation racket, or protection rackets involving private businesses. There is evidence that someone inside FSB might have been involved in smuggling cocaine. (https://www.rferl.org/a/argentina-russia-cocaine-plot-suspect-extradited-from-germany-jailed-in-moscow/29399251.html) Whine many evil deeds were ascribed to the soviet KGB, the corruption and all sorts of economic side businesses were not among those.

This is all the endorsement I need.

[TigerPlish]

Been thinking about getting some kind of encrypted email and move off the "normal" email providers.

That russia banned protonmail is a good endorsement for the product. I may go with them. If a totalitarian hates it is must be good!

Re:This is all the endorsement I need.

[jwymanm]

It'd be funny if the rest of the world started using ProtonMail BECAUSE Russia blackholed themselves from it hah! Imagine seeing countries say it's the only safe mail service from Russia hacking and has their full recommendation.

Re:This is all the endorsement I need.

[Obfuscant]

And imagine if Proton was actually being run by Russian operatives, who by blackholing it from their own people convinced everyone else in the world that it was secure and they all started using it, thus funneling all sensitive email through Russian hands by default. Ochen xorosho, tovarich.

Damn it !

[ControlsGeek]

How am I gonna correspond with all those beautiful Russian brides now ??

In Russia

[Virtucon]

Black hole mails you.