After signing controversial anti-terrorist legislation earlier today, President Putin ordered the Federal Security Service (the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the KGB) to produce encryption keys to decrypt all data on the Internet. According to the executive order, the FSB has two weeks to do it. Responsibility for carrying out Putin's instructions falls on Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB.

    The new “anti-terrorist” laws require all “organizers of information distribution” that add “additional coding” to transmitted electronic messages to provide the FSB with any information necessary to decrypt those messages. It's still unclear what information exactly online resources are expected to turn over, given that all data on the Internet is encoded, one way or another, and in many instances encryption keys for encrypted information simply don't exist.

Source @ meduza.io

ADDENDUM

And that's just one of the things happening in Russia that nobody's talking about. Unlike the US, Russia has a very different culture as far as freedom of speech is concerned: Russians are unwilling to speak up and talk freely about anything anywhere beyond the familiar company because it may cause as much as unlawful arrest and a sentence with fabricated data. It makes me wonder, though, why does the same website's English version contain so much info while the Russian version barely has anything on some things and vice versa for others.

Turkish students are getting forcibly expelled from Russian universities (article in Russian; no English version) after the debacle with the shot-down Russian Su-24:

    On the 25th of May [2016 — meduza.io] people from FMS [Federal Migration Service — TFG] or FSB [Federal Security Service, though most known by its Russian abbreviation — TFG] — I didn't understand — came to my dorm room. They gave me a paper which I was, as they said, supposed to sign. My Russian wasn't good, so I had no choice but to sign without figuring it out. They then told me that, according to this paper I must leave Russia in three days without stating any reason.

Putin and the Gosduma play cat-and-mouse with the new gun law (article in Russian):

    «Rossiyskaya Gazeta» [literally "Russian Newspaper" — TFG] published two variants of the same gun law. In the document on the website of the print it's stated, that possessing of a civilian firearm is limited to five years [per registration and each renewal — TFG]. The paperprint's variant of the law makes it ten years, instead. <...> The newspaper has declined commenting on the reason for printing the ten-year version.

"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" is the official government newspaper. Laws are to come online after they've been published in the "Gazeta". Many of the Gosduma's senators state that they've been voting for the ten-year law. The one signed by Putin is one with the five-year limit.

RuNet - the Russian portion of the Internet - is to get a "backup" (article in Russian):

    Such a system, say the project members, "will help with optimizing the routing" or fight DDoS attacks more effectively.

The RBC article on the matter also says:

    The Foundation [of Network Technologies Development, who work on creating the local backup/autonomous system —TFG] also plans to develop the system of traffic movement visualization to reveal the problems of routing, as well as to create a range of web-tools that would allow the Russian specialists to the get real-time information on the status of the Internet and their [the system and the Internet? — TFG] interaction.

In other words, it will allow the "Russian specialists" to spy on its citizens and, potentially, control the traffic much more effectively, let alone allow the Byte Curtain to separate RuNet from the rest of the world's.

kingmudsy:

Holy shit, Russia...

Is it time yet to start a "Get ThatFanficGuy out of Russia" GoFundMe?

Also, there's no way they'll be able to decrypt the entire internet in two weeks, it's hilarious that they're even trying to do that.


posted 2848 days ago