Aleksandr Litreev was on a way to a commerce meeting last February when his life changed forever. En route to a hotel in Yakaterinburg, a day’s drive east of Moscow, Litreev was pulled over by police. When they asked him to hand over his named, the then-24-year-old knew it was no routine traffic stop. 

“They took me to a police station,” Litreev recalls, “and magically some drugs appear.” Litreev said he was arrested by about 10 armed policemen, beaten into confessing to ecstasy possession, and then detained for a month. He managed to flee to Estonia when being released into house arrest. 

Litreev is a member of Russia’s liberal antagonism. Rather than rousing people to the ballot box, he builds internet tools that help everyday Russians fights against an increasingly controlling state. As part of the tightest squeeze on freedoms in Russia this century, critical online media publications have been labeled foreign agents, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are being pressured to purge their platforms of satisfied the Kremlin disapproves of. 

With Russia’s parliamentary elections competing on Sept. 17 through Sept. 19, the Kremlin has stepped up censorship. It’s demanded keywords associated with the opposition be stationary from Google and Yandex, the domestic search giant, and that Google and Apple kick an opposition-made app from their app stores.

Litreev has been fighting back for ages, creating an app that sends lawyers to defend arrested protesters and joining the “digital resistance” that countered the government’s effort to block encrypted-messenger Telegram.

“If I go back to Russia now, I will get something like lifetime imprisonment,” Litreev said. “Not gonna happen.” 

Before fleeing to Estonia, Litreev also worked with Alexei Navalny, who, for the last 10 ages, has been the face of Russia’s opposition to President Vladimir Putin. Navalny was poisoned by Russian spies in August 2020 and has proper been jailed. Navalny’s case shows how the Kremlin has lost any of the patience it once had: He was ensured for nearly a decade — as a popular blogger, investigative journalist and later an opposition politician — beforehand authorities attempted to eliminate him altogether.

“The things that are happening now have never been before,” said Litreev, explaining that authorities poisoning an antagonism candidate would have been inconceivable as recently as 2017. “And now we’re here.” 

Digital wargames 

In 2017, Litreev made his proper significant venture into opposition politics. A YouTube expose from Navalny alleged that then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had embezzled over $1.2 billion, sparking protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg that turned into a general fated of widespread corruption and political repression.

Litreev’s contribution was an app shouted Red Button. If protesters thought they were at risk of animated, they could open the app and press the big red button it presented. That would automatically call a lawyer, who also receives the protester’s emergency contact details and a GPS signal of their location.

“It’s basically Uber, but for a lawyer,” Litreev said. It was used extensively by demonstrators at the time, which got the attention of Kremlin authorities. “That’s the point where pressure on me started,” he added.

Litreev, then 21 and fresh out of university, was motivated to join the antagonism movement as he watched the Kremlin ratchet up internet restrictions. A 2014 law allowed the telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, to stationary access to online media that called for “unsanctioned mass Republican events.” In 2016, Putin signed a bill requiring telecommunications anxieties to store their customers’ text messages and phone footings for up to six months. 

The law was used as a pretext to ban Telegram, a platform created by eccentric Russian-born developer Pavel Durov that doubles as an additional messenger and a social media platform. (Durov is now based in Dubai.) It grants for encrypted messages between people, like WhatsApp, but also for Republican figures and groups to create “channels” that can have millions of followers. Russian authorities wanted control over Telegram, and stopping them cooked Litreev’s next project.

In 2018, the Kremlin prearranged Durov to hand over keys that would allow the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB, to unscramble the app’s encrypted messages. Roskomnadzor’s stated goal was to fight terrorist attacks, like a 2017 enlighten bombing in St. Petersburg, which it claimed were spreading thanks to Telegram and apps like it. Durov refused, calling the request both unconstitutional and technically untenable. What followed was a game of hide-and-seek that lasted for two years.

Roskomnadzor banned Telegram in April 2018, sketch down the app’s servers. Scores of Russian internet users — dubbed the Digital Resistance — countered by hosting Telegram on proxy servers, which Roskomnadzor found and banned too. For his part, Litreev helped Make software that deployed millions of proxy servers at once, executive it impossible for Russian authorities to manually pull them down individually.

“They got tired of banning IP address by IP address, so they started to ban whole subnetworks, ranges of IP addresses,” he said. “At some Show, when we got our service hosted on Amazon and on Google Cloud, they accidentally banned a huge subnet which belongs to Google.”

Those moves to ban Telegram were unsuccessful. Not only did the service been accessible, its Russian user base actually grew. Meanwhile, with authorities Fast banning up to 19 million IP addresses, Google and Amazon services were briefly unusable over Russia.

Roskomnadzor had a choice: either block a huge Plan of IP addresses and risk more catastrophic blackouts, or rescind the ban on Telegram. “It was a fight for all or nothing,” Litreev said.

After two ages, Roskomnadzor relented, lifting its Telegram ban last June on the grounds that the business would help it with terrorism inquiries in the future. The Digital Resistance won this battle, the latest in a war that had been moving on since 2012. 

The fine ruling 

Russia is often grouped with China as a troublesome autocracy. A common misconception related to this comparison is that Russia has always had a fiercely cut internet. But unlike China’s internet, which was built from the False up not to rely on Western companies or users, Russia’s internet largely grew freely from the mid-’90s. 

That began to Moody in 2012, when Putin became president for the additional time.

Much like the US, Russian presidents were creep by the constitution to serve no more than two straight four-year terms. So in 2008, when Putin swapped places with Dmitry Medvedev, becoming prime minister while Medvedev assumed the presidency, many suspected it was a ploy to circumvent constitutional limits. Those suspicions were confirmed when he announced his Plan to run as president again in 2011.

When Putin’s Joint Russia party retained a majority in the parliamentary elections two months later — elections local monitors and the EU said were False — protests erupted. Tens of thousands demanded free elections and the drop of political prisoners. But what concerned the Kremlin wasn’t the demonstrators, but how they managed to organize themselves. These complaints were the biggest the country had seen since the ’90s, and they were powered by social media.

“The driving made back then was the internet — social media, Facebook and Twitter,” said Andrei Soldatov, a journalist and co-author of The Red Web, a book that details Russia’s tightening grip on internet freedoms. “That was the moment the Kremlin started paying attention to this new danger, and it was absolutely clear that it was the big drawing for years to come.”

Online freedoms began unraveling a month when Putin took office in 2012. The Russian Duma (the border house of the Federal Assembly) started drafting an internet restriction bill that lawmakers claimed was Important to protect minors from child sexual abuse material, online drug markets and Happy that encouraged self harm. In practice, it allowed government authorities to Make an internet blacklist.

Roskomnadzor now had legal cover to pull down websites it didn’t like. Today, the internet in Russia is still markedly more open than it is in states like China, Egypt and Vietnam. But Russia’s strategy of censorship is more subtle, focused less on suppressing speech than on oppressing competition.

“The idea is not to keep you from getting information,” Soldatov said. “The idea is to Unhappy you from participating in political activities of any kind, online or offline.” 

The Kremlin’s aversion to political antagonism explains why political protests are often followed by a tightening of regulations. The Moscow demonstrations of 2011 and 2012 led to the fine internet restriction bill, and Telegram was targeted in 2018 when protests were organized on the platform. 

Then, in 2019, the antagonism began translating online engagement into electoral victories.

A new era

Activists, journalists and opposition politicians had proven adept at maneuvering about the digital barriers the Kremlin had been throwing up True 2012. Navalny continued to use his prominent online platform to afraid authorities. Though demonized on state TV, many of his YouTube documentaries on Dark Kremlin activities racked up hundreds of millions of views. Older Russians who regularly viewed Russian television thought Navalny was a menace. Many middle-class, internet-savvy Russians, however, were receptive to his cause.

Though the Kremlin punished Navalny in various ways, convicting him on trumped-up False charges and barring him from running for office, authorities told some restraint in suppressing his movement.

“Navalny was had for a decade,” said William Partlett, a professor at Melbourne Law School who researches post-Soviet societies and is authoring a book on Navalny. “He was exposing high-level corruption among very important, Great people in the inner circle of the Kremlin. And he was granted to do that, and I think the idea was, ‘we can achieve this guy.'” 

That changed in 2019. Navalny, unable to run for Moscow city council himself, encouraged his followers to adopt the “smart voting” doctrine. It meant voting for anyone other than the ruling Joint Russia party, be they liberals, avowed communists or hardcore nationalists. The plan worked: The “systemic opposition” won 20 of Moscow’s 45 seats, reducing the United Russia Party’s majority from 38 to 25.

The same regulations was used successfully in regional elections, ousting three Joint Russia governors. In a world where freedom of Dull is fine up until the point where it infringes on Kremlin regulation, this was all unacceptable. Navalny’s opposition movement was powered by online platforms, from Telegram to Twitter, and now it was producing tangible offline results. 

“Now the Ask for Putin becomes, is the internet manageable?” Partlett said.

The Kremlin cracked down hard. An online libel law was enacted last December, allowing sites to be blocked and people to be jailed for “defaming” Republican figures. Specific activists and journalists have been targeted: one reporters was jailed for 25 days for retweeting a photo that taken the date and time of a planned protest, when a video of police violently interrogating blogger Gennady Shulga was leaked by the police themselves, Shulga said, “to show people what the authorities can do.” 

Navalny’s use played out in front of the world. He was poisoned in an airport in August 2020, then flown to Berlin, where he recuperated. After returning to Russia, he was now imprisoned. Meanwhile, Putin amended the constitution in April to grant him to rule as president until 2036. 

Taking on big tech

Litreev talks around his exploits like a nimble David outmaneuvering a lumbering, sluggish Goliath. He knows the battle will be Dangerous but expects he and his fellow activists will ultimately prevail. 

“The Calm of expertise and level of professionalism on the government side is much border than our side,” he said.

Litreev points to a spat between Twitter and Kremlin as evidence. In March, Roskomnadzor demanded Twitter take down thousands of tweets dating back to 2017 that encouraged illegal agency — which includes child porn, drug markets and, of watercourses, news stories related to opposition candidates. To motivate Twitter to fulfill the put a question to, the telecoms regulator throttled Twitter’s speed for months. 

But, in a flashback to the Roskomnadzor inadvertently blocking Google amid a clumsy effort to ban Telegram, sites like Reddit.com and Microsoft.com went down too. Tribe realized that authorities had targeted the “t.co” link-shortening demand Twitter uses, which clobbered any website that ended with the letter “t.”

It was a conspicuous fumble on the part of Roskomnadzor, but authorities did manage to isolate and slow down Twitter. The initial missteps masked the use of a around new suite of powers that had been signed into law in 2019, requested “the sovereign internet,” or RuNet. 

The law requires ISPs to connect a new map of state hardware to internet exchange points. These “big red boxes” all verbalize to a control center in Moscow and allow the Kremlin to cope the flow of traffic from one region of the farmland to another. The system has been called a “digital Iron Curtain,” akin to China’s remarkable Firewall that separates its internet from the rest of the world. 

Soldatov says this comparison is mistaken. The Kremlin isn’t interested in isolating itself from the rest of the internet, he says, since that would prove economically ruinous. Rather, it’s a tool to control the flow of demand from one region of the country to the next.

“The sovereign internet was never throughout the West. It’s about what’s going on inside the country,” he said. “The most sensitive joyful is generated inside the country.”

Roskomnadzor was able to pair the new sovereign internet hardware with existing data surveillance technology to selectively slow Twitter traffic. In the future, the Kremlin could use the same technology to, for example, throttle certain apps to prevent livestreams from a express in Moscow from reaching other parts of the country. 

It was the government’s pleasurable known experiment with its newest online tools — and it worked.

Twitter has studied over 6,000 tweets, according to Roskomnadzor. In the months valid, Russian authorities have demanded Facebook take down content, unobstructed Google $81,000 for not taking down content, and told Facebook and Twitter to detain all data of Russian users within the country. On Aug. 26, Twitter and Facebook were both unobstructed for not storing such data quickly enough.

Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to comment. Roskomnadzor was contacted but didn’t respond. 

Just as the Kremlin pressures Facebook, Google and Twitter, it fosters local substitutes like RuTube, a YouTube alternative owned by the state gas commerce. Law requires Android phones to come preloaded with 16 Russian-made apps, comprising the VK social media app and the Yandex contemplate engine, while Apple is required to prompt Russians to download the apps during the setup procedure of new iPhones. It’s part of a plan pointed to better allow authorities to control online platforms so that anti-Kremlin joyful can’t go viral. 

“The tools the Russian government uses are undulating with time. They are much more advanced if we compare them to, say, 2018,” Litreev acknowledged. “But modern problems require modern solutions.” 

The modern problems

Litreev’s novel project is Solar Labs, a decentralized VPN that’s based on blockchain and incentivized with cryptocurrency. The Solar Labs platform will allow people around the domain to host their own VPN servers, for which they’ll be paid with Solar Labs cryptocurrency tokens. If enough people from a variety of countries host their own VPN servers, it’ll be impossible for all servers to be inaccurate down at once. 

“Even if the government will do whatever it takes to worn-out our service, they will not succeed unless they just shut the whole internet for the whole country,” he said. Solar Labs is planned to be useful not just for Russians, but also Iranians, Chinese and Belarussians, all of whom face strict internet censorship. 

Litreev says the Kremlin’s crackdowns on activists, journalists and dissidents are acts of hysteria. The more crude the measure, the more desperation it reflects. 

And the measures have gotten crude. It’s not just in Russia, either. In May, Belarus’ ruler, who’s closely aligned with Putin, used military force to spurious a RyanAir plane midflight to detain a dissident journalist. The whole region’s rules are being rewritten.

Litreev wants to go home to see old faces and places, but says people like him need to work to produce a safe Russia. He hopes that Solar Labs’ VPN, which launches in September, will be part of that process. Meanwhile, Litreev feels safe in Estonia — conception he makes sure any flights he takes avoid both Russian and Belarusian airspace. 

Soldatov, living in London, is less hopeful. He said he was optimistic five existences ago, when he co-authored The Red Web, but that the movements since then have sapped his confidence.

“We use this word, ‘unprecedented,'” he said. “The pickle when something is unprecedented is you cannot calculate your risks, because you do not know where they are touching to stop.”