How Western Tech Companies Help Russia Censor the Internet
In early December, Russian censors achieved an unexpected victory: internet users across the country reported that Tor, the encrypted service that allows users to bypass government control of the internet, had become inaccessible. Russian security services had spent years trying to neutralize Tor, viewing it as a tool of censorship used by the West to circumvent their own controls. Tor’s creation was sponsored by the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, which provides technical support to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Ironically, the Russian state managed to score a win against information freedom with the help of Western companies.
Russia calls its internet control system the “sovereign Runet.” This nationwide system, managed from a central hub in Moscow, is designed to block traffic the Kremlin disapproves of. It can isolate specific segments of the internet or cut off entire regions from the web in the event of protests or unrest. In many ways, the system’s effectiveness is a testament to the skill of Russian engineers, who designed, tested, and implemented it in just two years, starting in 2019.
Despite its name, foreign technology is crucial to the system. Its control center, located in a lavishly restored 19th-century red-brick building on the Moscow River, is equipped with 30 servers from the Chinese company Lenovo and another 30 from the American company Super Micro Computer. But this is just the hardware that gives the system its computing power. Far more important is the deep packet inspection (DPI) software, which allows Russian censors to block Tor traffic or throttle Twitter nationwide, as they did earlier this year.
The authors of the article reached out to the companies mentioned above for comment. Only Super Micro responded: “Super Micro Computer complies with applicable laws and regulations, and our policy is consistent with international human rights principles. We take appropriate measures to ensure this.”
By order of the censors, every Russian internet service provider must install a surveillance technology package supplied by the Israeli firm Silicom Ltd. In September, Russian human rights activists called on Silicom to respond about its involvement in creating the sovereign internet, but the company did not reply.
Many experts have long suggested that modern dictatorships would rely on each other’s help for online surveillance. This idea is partly based on a historical analogy—the sale of Soviet and Chinese weapons to other despotic regimes during the Cold War. This way of thinking treats surveillance and censorship as modern weapons. It seemed logical that shipments of tanks and Kalashnikovs to these regimes would be accompanied by software and hardware for spying on dissidents, activists, and journalists.
But things turned out differently. Of the technologies used by Russian censors in their sovereign internet system, only some of the hardware comes from China. Lenovo originated in China, but its headquarters are in the U.S. Lenovo is more accurately described as a Chinese-American transnational corporation. Super Micro is also headquartered in the U.S. DPI technology itself is a Western invention.
On December 6, Russian internet censors purchased several internet traffic analysis solutions developed by IXIA, which is part of Keysight Technologies, another American company based in California.
These days, dictatorships are too smart to disconnect from Western technology, even if they declare digital sovereignty as a national goal. When it comes to surveillance and censorship, they want to get the job done and don’t worry much about who provides the tools. For example, Saudi Arabia clearly had no qualms about using surveillance software from the Israeli company NSO Group (the company later terminated its contract with the Saudis after negative publicity).
But this also means that even as dictatorships build barriers, including online, there are things that can be done from the outside to slow their progress in suppressing human and political rights in their countries.
Tech companies shouldn’t be left alone to decide whether to cooperate with these regimes. Google made the right decision to end its controversial project to develop a search engine compatible with China’s censorship regime. But there are other low-profile companies that seem to have few such doubts.
There are many experts, journalists, and human rights organizations who are fully capable of explaining the consequences of technology when it’s used by the dark side. Companies can no longer claim ignorance about the situation in these countries while continuing to help authoritarian regimes.
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