How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia
THE KEY PARAGRAPH in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan’s new book, The Red Web, comes surprisingly late, after the authors have described the long and ambitious construction of a wide-ranging, all-penetrating Internet surveillance and censorship system in Russia.
“To make the system work across the country, the filtering system required a lot of people,” they write, pointing out that many hands were needed to keep track of the data passing through all of the thousands of Internet service providers in the country. “The specialists needed technical training, had to comply with orders, no questions asked, and they had to protect the secrecy of the operations. … Russia had plenty of such specialists.”
These “specialists” didn’t just understand the technology — they were willing to use their knowledge to serve the state’s repressive machine. Borogan and Soldatov show precisely how those who enable censorship and surveillance justify their participation. Among the many people interviewed for the book is a Russian engineer who developed speech-recognition technology used by a number of repressive regimes. “If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!” he says.
As Soldatov and Borogan explain,
“These exact words have been repeated over and over again by engineers who willingly served the Soviet state and then did the same thing in Russia. They believed it was not their fault. When Stalin’s security services in the 1930s and 1940s needed to conduct secret research in particular areas, they arrested scientists and engineers and sent them to special installations, the sharashkas, which were closed off from the outside and heavily guarded. The scientists and engineers were motivated to produce quick results under the threat of being sent to labor camps if they failed. But in the years after Stalin’s death in 1953 this system evolved into a far-reaching system of research institutes, not all of them closed.”
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