{"id":12034,"date":"2015-09-09T07:34:16","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T12:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12034"},"modified":"2015-09-09T07:34:16","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T12:34:16","slug":"how-putin-controls-the-internet-and-popular-opinion-in-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12034","title":{"rendered":"How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2015\/09\/08\/how-putin-controls-the-russian-internet\/\" target=\"_blank\">How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><u>THE KEY PARAGRAPH<\/u>\u00a0in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan\u2019s new book,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Red-Web-Dictators-Revolutionaries\/dp\/1610395735\">The Red Web<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo make the system work across the country, the filtering system required a lot of people,\u201d 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. \u201cThe specialists needed technical training, had to comply with orders, no questions asked, and they had to protect the secrecy of the operations. \u2026 Russia had plenty of such specialists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These \u201cspecialists\u201d didn\u2019t just understand the technology \u2014 they were willing to use their knowledge to serve the state\u2019s 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. \u201cIf governments listen in on people\u2019s conversations, it\u2019s not the microphone\u2019s fault!\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>As Soldatov and Borogan explain,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThese 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\u2019s 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\u00a0<em>sharashkas<\/em>, 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\u2019s death in 1953 this system evolved into a far-reaching system of research institutes, not all of them closed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia THE KEY PARAGRAPH\u00a0in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan\u2019s new book,\u00a0The 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. \u201cTo make the system work across the country, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8848,8847,660,694,742,765,5567,8846],"class_list":["post-12034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-andrei-soldatov","tag-irina-borogan","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-soviet-union","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-the-red-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12034"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12035,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12034\/revisions\/12035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}