Covert Censorship Ahead of Elections
As the State Duma elections approached, Roskomnadzor continued to make loud statements about various “inadmissible” activities, alternately addressing foreign internet services and the media. Meanwhile, a mysterious force was selectively blocking resources related to “Smart Voting” as well as tools that could help bypass these blocks. The strange part is that there was not a single mention of these resources in the official registry of banned information. In other words, no authorized government body-from the courts to the Prosecutor General’s Office or even Roskomnadzor itself-had made any official decision to block these sites. No organization permitted by Russian law took responsibility for the chaos happening online.
For example, while the formal procedures outlined in the law were at least followed for the “Smart Voting” website and its clones, the blocking of public DNS services, DHT, and DoH protocols was completely illegal. Roskomnadzor allegedly just used so-called technical threat countermeasures (TSPU), without reporting to the internet community or businesses. Despite the “advanced” systems used by the agency, they couldn’t take down “Smart Voting” without affecting the rest of the Russian internet-last week, there were outages in torrents, gaming, communication, and even e-commerce platforms, since they use the very protocols that Roskomnadzor secretly and unlawfully banned.
The agency gave no comments. Services simply went down, and that was it. Recently, without any warning, the Red Shield VPN service created by well-known IT expert Vladislav Zdolnikov also became unavailable. This VPN is used to bypass blocks, including restoring access to “Smart Voting.”
“Russian authorities started blocking Red Shield VPN via TSPU today at 3:00 PM Moscow time. Obviously, the block is related to the publication of Smart Voting candidate lists,” Zdolnikov wrote on his Telegram channel.
In a conversation with “Mediazona,” the expert added that, according to his information, other VPN services were also being blocked during the same period. He believes the authorities think this will prevent voters from learning about Smart Voting’s recommendations.
As you might guess, there was no sign of redshieldvpn.com in the banned information registry.
Major Platforms Targeted
That night, something many had anticipated finally happened-the authorities dared to strike at mainstream services, resulting in the loss of access to docs.google.com. According to Vadim Losev, an information security specialist at “RosKomSvoboda”:
“After Leonid Volkov published candidate lists in Google Docs, it looks like they started testing blocking the service in St. Petersburg. Tele2 is blocking by SNI. There’s a high risk that tomorrow there will be problems with Google services.”
Philipp Kulin, creator of “Escher II,” wrote that Google Docs was also unavailable on “Megafon.” In addition to Megafon and Tele2, docs.google.com was blocked by Yota, MTS, and Rostelecom.
“This is just incredible. They’re blocking GOOGLE DOCS! I wouldn’t be surprised if they start throttling YouTube by Friday (or even earlier),” wrote former “Echo of Moscow” journalist and blogger Mike Naki.
It’s worth noting that individual Google Docs pages had previously been added to the banned sites registry, but without restricting access to the entire service.
Besides docs.google.com, the telegra.ph platform-a service for reading and writing texts from the creators of Telegram-was also blocked.
“How many office workers will spend the last working days of this week in production hell because of the blocked service and broken servers is anyone’s guess,” Readovka sarcastically noted.
“The only residents of Russia who can still use the service are Muscovites, since the blocks didn’t affect the capital,” Readovka also reported.
Unaccountable Blocking and Legal Gray Zones
Vladislav Zdolnikov called the situation “lawlessness,” since these blocks do not appear in Roskomnadzor’s official registries:
“So, they don’t even exist according to their own laws. If you can’t access telegra.ph or docs.google.com, contact your provider right now and ask, ‘What the hell?’ Tell them you’ll leave them over this tomorrow. You can do it in chat and by phone at the same time.
The point is: these sites are only blocked by providers that have TSPU installed. Not all providers have them. Providers without TSPU have a competitive advantage. This is good motivation for providers to pressure Roskomnadzor-‘Why are we blocking when others aren’t? We’re losing customers.’
By the way, if your provider blocks something not in the Roskomnadzor registry, that’s illegal, so demand compensation. Start right now!”
Telecom operators are required to install TSPU under the so-called “Sovereign/ Secure Runet” law (90-FZ). The law’s authors claimed these devices would protect the Russian internet from external threats, but in practice, they are used for more targeted censorship of the digital information space. Previously, blocking unwanted internet resources was less precise; for example, in the campaign against the previously banned Telegram messenger, Roskomnadzor affected millions of IP addresses, disrupting many unrelated resources, including government ones. This episode went down in Runet history as “carpet bombing” or “IP genocide.”
Internet experts, including “RosKomSvoboda,” immediately expressed concerns that the “Sovereign Runet” law would be used not to protect the Russian segment of the internet, but to restrict access to banned information, with Roskomnadzor managing the process without any accountability. As predicted, the agency now decides, with zero transparency, which sites or even protocols can exist and which will disappear from Runet.
Vladislav Zdolnikov was among the first to report on the misuse of TSPU. According to him, authorities initially tested these devices, monitoring how targeted blocks affected unrelated sites and whether they disrupted critical services. By spring and summer of this year, they began targeting Alexei Navalny’s resources, which had previously managed to avoid blocks.
At first, TSPU-based blocking gave the authorities some advantages, but once they started targeting protocols, things went wrong again. Since Roskomnadzor is as unaccountable as ever, it’s impossible to say whether they will continue attacking programs that enable millions of websites to function globally. However, it’s clear they have already crossed the line when it comes to popular and critical services for most Russians. Although by morning the agency had unblocked docs.google.com and telegra.ph, the risk of this “spectacular show” continuing remains high:
“…But it seems that during the night’s block, the banned list of approved candidates had already spread to many UGC platforms: Medium, GitHub.”
Philipp Kulin wrote:
“I actually have a guess about what’s happening globally. The Central Monitoring and Management Center for Public Communication Networks at the GRChTs under Roskomnadzor doesn’t have a testbed for TSPU. Well, there’s some kind of testbed, but how it will behave at real scale, in real conditions-I’m sure they never even considered that. How can you predict anything without trying? But these are dangerous games, and big players will be upset.”
He added that the current political events, especially involving “Smart Voting,” gave the authorities a convenient excuse to ramp up efforts, regardless of reputational damage:
“Everyone understands. It’s a fight against the Pechenegs. It’s a clear and timely fight for everyone. Just ‘pump it up’ a bit, and you can justify any filtering experiment. If the situation gets out of control and takes on a life of its own? So be it. Who cares. As long as the digital Oprichnina doesn’t affect systemically important enterprises, it’s fine.”
Meanwhile, Vladislav Zdolnikov published responses from several providers regarding the night’s incident with docs.google.com and telegra.ph. Yota blamed the unavailability of Google services on issues with the American corporation itself, while Tele2 assured users there were no restrictions on their end and advised clearing browser cache and cookies. Zdolnikov called this passing the buck and urged users to complain to their providers.
“I want to thank Dozhd, Meduza, Mediazona, and all the media outlets that reported on the Red Shield VPN block. When blocks happen secretly via TSPU, publicity really helps fight back,” he also wrote.
Escalating Surveillance and Censorship
Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society (OZI), drew attention to a recent demand from the Bank of Russia (dated September 6, 2021) for credit organizations to stop using another Google service-reCAPTCHA.
“So, Russians will wake up in the morning and all remote banking systems will be down,” he speculated. “This is exactly the kind of situation where things break in the most unexpected places. And this probably isn’t the worst case-we’ll find out tomorrow. Maybe by the smoke signals.”
Recently, it was revealed that Roskomnadzor plans to launch a system for automatically searching for “banned” information in the media and social networks. The system will track mirrors of blocked sites, analyze the author’s opinion, and even predict which internet users might be interested in texts containing banned information based on social and demographic factors like gender, age, education, and income. The system will cost nearly 60 million rubles.
As we can see, Roskomnadzor is ramping up its blocking and surveillance capabilities without any accountability to Russian citizens or responsibility for its own violations. Based on political expediency, the authorities have simply started quietly and covertly removing information inconvenient to them from the information space, with no regard for the interests of Russians or their own reputation.