Washington D.C. – The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is honored to announce its new Distinguished Fellow, Admiral (Ret.) James G. Foggo III.
Admiral Foggo’s remarkable career within the U.S. Navy and the transatlantic Alliance brings years of leadership, expertise, and insight to CEPA’s Transatlantic Defense and Security initiative.
In September 2020, Foggo retired from his positions as Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa and Commander of Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, Italy. Throughout his tenure, he helped strengthen the Alliance’s posture in all strategic directions, enhancing naval cooperation and interoperability across Europe. Prior to this, Foggo served as Commander of U.S. 6th Fleet and NATO’s Naval Striking and Support Forces, working with allies and partners to respond to emerging security threats in the North Atlantic, Arctic, Black Sea, Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa.
“I have served overseas five times in my 39-year career in the United States Navy. I am a staunch Trans-Atlanticist and a firm believer in the value of the NATO Alliance. We are Stronger Together!”
In addition to his numerous deployments at sea, Foggo has worked with the Joint Staff (J5) for Western Europe and the Balkans, European Command (EUCOM), and the U.S. Navy Staff. His intimate knowledge of the transatlantic relationship and European security environment will be invaluable to CEPA’s efforts to foster deeper cooperation between the United States and Europe.
Dr. Alina Polyakova, President and CEO, explained, “With his deep expertise, exemplary leadership, and passion for Atlanticism, Admiral Foggo embodies CEPA’s core mission. We are honored to have him join our team at this critical time for the transatlantic community.”
Foggo will contribute to CEPA’s projects on Black Sea and Nordic-Baltic regional security, as well as strategic work on NATO’s future. As a dedicated mentor and advocate for inclusivity, Admiral Foggo will also support CEPA’s efforts to cultivate the next generation of transatlantic leaders.
“Admiral Foggo represents the best of the Alliance,” said Lauren M. Speranza, Director of CEPA’s Transatlantic Defense and Security Program. “There is no one better to bring the maritime understanding of Europe and the Alliance to CEPA. His distinguished experience across the Atlantic, Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean Seas will bring tremendous value to our transatlantic security work.”
Foggo’s awards include the Meritorious Service Cross (Canada), Commander of the Cross of Saint George (Portugal); Commander of the Order of Merit (Italian Republic); Knight of the Legion of Honor (France); Knight of the National Order of Merit (France); Defense Distinguished Service Medal; Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, and NATO Meritorious Service Medal. A 1981 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Foggo is also an Olmsted Scholar and Moreau Scholar. He earned a Master of Public Administration at Harvard University and a Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies in Defense and Strategic Studies from the University of Strasbourg, France.
WP Post Author
October 8, 2020
The Three Seas Initiative needs to be bolder and bigger.
The more you worry about China, the more you should care about international groupings that seek to counter its influence. But with less than a month to go before the Three Seas Summit in Tallinn (on October 19, postponed from June because of the pandemic), few clues have emerged about the agenda or participants.The 12-country Three Seas Initiative (3SI) started in 2015 to promote north-south ties between the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Communism’s legacy is still evident in the region’s infrastructure: too rickety, and mostly running on the east-west axis. It would take $1.16trn to bring digital, energy and transport connectivity up to western levels.
But the grouping’s implicit aim, backed by the United States and the European Union, is to compete with the 17+1. Launched by China in 2012, this currently brings 17 countries together to bid for infrastructure projects under the tutelage of the party-state in Beijing. Many see it as a vector for political and diplomatic influence too.
The groupings overlap, but not neatly. Austria is in the 3SI but not the 17+1. The eleven other 3SI members (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) are also in the 17 +1, but it also includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, and a new member, Greece.The 3SI got off to a good start, with notably high-profile summits in Warsaw in 2017 and Bucharest in 2018, but Ljubljana in 2019 was a flop. So hopes were high when the Estonians took over. In February the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, promised up to $1bn in funding to the new $520m 3SI Investment Fund.
Then came the pandemic and the postponement. Nothing much seemed to be happening. But officials in Tallinn were busy behind the scenes. The presidents of Germany, Poland and Bulgaria are expected to attend, at least virtually. So too may Pompeo himself (perhaps giving some more details of that $1bn). A heavyweight EU figure is penciled in too; the EU digital commissioner Margrethe Vestager would be a good choice, given Estonia’s emphasis on “smart connectivity” as a summit theme.
High on the agenda will be the location of next summit. An international conference would make a nice springboard for Bulgarian president Rumen Radev’s re-election campaign, which may be why he is planning to make time in his schedule for the Tallinn meeting. Whether the Bulgarian government would want to pay for the party is another question.
That underlines the importance of the 3SI working in future on an intergovernmental basis, rather than as a rotating presidential-level talking shop (most heads of state in the region have only modest executive powers). It needs a permanent secretariat to keep momentum. Estonia set up a small team but has no desire to keep doing the job. Hungary has shown some signs of interest, perhaps hoping to repair the reputational damage caused by its enthusiastic hosting of a murky Kremlin-affiliated development bank. Poland or Romania would be stronger candidates.
Strategy needs to be bolder. North-south connectivity should involve Ukraine. Getting ready to help Belarus when the regime falls should be a priority. Chinese influence is strongest in the Western Balkans — just where the 3SI’s footprint is smallest. The investment fund’s projects can range to neighboring countries but there is no appetite for new members.
The 17+1 summit in April was postponed, but China will be back next year, trying to bolster and expand its influence in the region. To counter that effectively, the 3SI needs to be more sharply focused, and above all bigger.
WP Post Author
September 21, 2020
Europe’s Edge is an online journal covering crucial topics in the transatlantic policy debate. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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The Vanishing Act
Anna ?dre explores how a Facebook post about an alleged plan to demolish a WWII memorial birthed a disinfo campaign to foment tension in Latvia.
Russian Influence in Romania
CEPA Fellow-in-Residence Corina Rebegea examines the Kremlin’s influence toolbox utilized in Romania.
Moscow’s Anti-NATO Deception
Moscow’s disinformation seeks to popularize false images of the West in the West.
Propaganda attack from the sea?
In 2019, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Agency’s annual report identified Russian sailing ships as tools in the Kremlin’s on-going propaganda campaigns. The annual Tallinn Maritime Days is one of the targets for this propaganda.
The Georgian conflict: was Tbilisi an exception?
Propastop examines the recent protests in Georgia over Russia’s continuing interference, and how it could affect other countries in Europe.
CEPA #DisinfoNet
CEPA #DisinfoNet is an initiative of the CEPA StratCom Program. It represents a coalition of think tanks and organizations from across Central-East Europe and the United States working to better understand and combat the Kremlin’s hostile disinformation and propaganda activities.
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The Wider Net
How does the Kremlin maintain its influence in the West?
Russia and China through eyes of NATO and EU intelligence agencies
Disinformation in the Online Sphere: The Case of BIH
Western Balkans at the Crossroads: Assessing Influences of Non-Western External Actors
Irregularity Analysis on Moldova Parliamentary Elections PART III
How can we silence trolls?
The Chinese Propaganda Machine: The Awakening Giant Turns to the West
Election Interference in the Digital Age – Building Resilience to Cyber-Enabled Threats in the EU
#EUelections2019: The EU Must Take Disinformation Seriously
Robot videos spread anti-Estonian propaganda in Youtube
Can you recognize the bias?
The war of winning hearts and minds in Venezuela
News word – Baltophobia
Eastern Focus – Elections and Malign Interference
Why Is Russia Meddling In Moldova’s 2019 Elections?
Influence of Russian Disinformation Operations – Specific examples in data and numbers
External Propaganda in the Republic of Moldova
Anti-western propaganda in Romania 2018
Unprepared and vulnerable: The resilience of the Slovak republic to foreign, foremost Kremlin-led disinformation campaigns
Kremlin Countermeasures 2018
Disinformation Resilience in Central and Eastern Europe
Czech Election in an Era of Disinformation – Czech Presidential Election 2018
Czech Election in an Era of Disinformation – Czech Senate Election 2018
Propaganda Made to Measure: How Our Vulnerabilities Facilitate Russian Influence
CEPA StratCom Analysis
Battleground Wikipedia
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Russia’s Influence Arsenal
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Watch Out, This Is What China Is Learning From Russia Last week’s column looked at six political warfare tactics common to Russia and China, and three that are used (so far) only by the regime in Beijing. That leaves eleven Kremlin-only ones. For convenience, they are in (English) alphabetical order. First is the exploitation of economic, ethnic, linguistic, […]
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Moscow’s Anti-NATO Deception
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Why Does Moscow View NATO as a Threat? Since the formation of NATO seventy years ago to defend Europe from a potential Soviet invasion, propagandists in Moscow have berated the Alliance as an aggressor. In the post-Soviet era, President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has continued this tradition of deception and added several new themes for Western […]
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The Vanishing Act
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A full archive of the former CEPA StratCom portal can be accessed here.
Russia is not going away. We need a strategy
This is no time to worry about Russia. Ukraine is fighting for its own survival and for freedom everywhere. All efforts should therefore go on raising money for humanitarian relief, educating foreign public opinion, pressing Western governments to supply arms and munitions, and in other acts of solidarity.
That argument is tempting. But it is wrong. Ukraine’s torment is largely the result of Western strategic failure. First, we misunderstood the Soviet collapse. Then we missed the stench of imperialism and authoritarianism hanging over the supposedly democratic and friendly new Russian state. We also ignored (chiefly because of greed) the corruption and gangsterism. Our approach was based on wishful thinking and implemented with stunning complacency.
Western countries should not make that mistake again. We need to set goals and priorities. We need to work out what sacrifices and risks we are prepared to take over the coming months, years, and decades. We should have done this in 1991. We should not delay further.
The shorthand term for our goal should be decolonization. Rather than narrowly focussing on “regime change” or the personality of Vladimir Putin, all outside countries dealing with Russia should hold this long-term aim in mind. Russia will be at peace with itself and its neighbors only once it ditches its imperial mindset, with its dire effects on both the state’s relations with its own people and on its treatment of its neighbors. Repression at home and aggression abroad stem from the same approach, which prizes power and glory over legality, liberty, dignity, and consent.
This wrenching transformation may come through economic weakness (as in post-war Britain), from military setbacks (France), or because of catastrophic defeat (Germany after 1945). The top priority, for now, should therefore be securing Ukraine’s military victory against the Kremlin’s invasion. If Putin can walk away from the war with territorial gains, he will claim vindication and the imperial war machine will be stronger, not weaker.
But our strategy must have other elements too.
One is to create surrogate structures abroad to compete with the Kremlin’s cultural, ideological, and ecclesiastical hegemony. Some of the most distinguished academics dealing with Russia, such as the historians Timothy Snyder and Alexander Etkind, are trying to establish a new East European University where Russians and Belarusians can teach, research, and study freely. As Russia’s academic life withers under the scrutiny of the FSB, this would be a powerful counterweight.
Another immediate priority is an alternative canonical authority for Russian-speaking Orthodox Christians who have broken with the Moscow Patriarchate. Dissident parishes in Lithuania and elsewhere are already looking for a new home. The obvious choice would be the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul in secular toponomy). This has already aroused Moscow’s ire with its welcome to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. During the Cold War, the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile was a useful competitor to the KGB-dominated church inside the Soviet Union. We need something similar now.
But the new Russian diaspora presents opportunities and difficulties. These new émigrés may be cross about the war, but they are not necessarily allies in the decolonization cause (Georgians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and others have plenty of stories of the new arrivals’ blithely unconscious imperialism). Though the brain drain clearly weakens the Russian economy, emigration is also a safety valve for the Kremlin. The easier we make it for Russians to live abroad, the less likely they are to go home and topple the regime. Yet if they feel harshly treated, their self-pity will intensify nationalist sentiment.
Such moral and strategic dilemmas abound. All the more reason to start grappling with them now.
Photo: Members of the local Russian diaspora in Krakow join the global anti-war demonstration of all free Russians and protest against the war with Ukraine at the Adam Mickiewicz monument in the Main Square in Krakow. On Sunday, June 12, 2022, in Krakow, Poland. Credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto
WP Post Author
June 19, 2022
Europe’s Edge is an online journal covering crucial topics in the transatlantic policy debate. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
European telecom operators are once again knocking on doors in the halls of governments seeking relief from Big Tech for the costs of building and operating their networks.
Telecom operators cite what they say is an imbalance in revenue between operators themselves and the over-the-top (OTT) Internet service providers such as Netflix, Meta, and Google. Previously rebuffed, this time they may have found allies in Europe’s Digital Commissioners Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton.
US and European leaders should tackle the issue at their upcoming May 15-16 Trade and Technology Council in Paris. Although both sides seek to avoid a conflict in their pursuit of pushing back Russian military and digital aggression, the US must present its concerns on this potential discriminatory tax on its biggest industries. It should do so now, not later, before Brussels proposes legislation. In the past, Washington has spoken out too late in the legislative process about its concerns about European tech proposals to have an impact.
The idea of cost-sharing between communications providers has its roots in the revenue settlements system used for old-fashioned voice analog telephone networks. Under this traditional telco regime, governments negotiated rates via the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Before the Internet, most telecom operators were public monopolies. It made sense for governments to set the terms and conditions for interconnection. Circuit-switched technology allowed for easy origination and destination location identification, making it straightforward to split the costs based on the ITU established rates.
The Internet overturned this equation. Voice traffic moved online to messaging apps. Seeking to recover lost funds, some governments and incumbent telcos, initially in the developing world, pushed for the development of an Internet cost-sharing model. Their argument was simple: data-hungry Internet companies providing video streaming and sharing consumed a disproportionate share of Internet traffic and should pay extra for it.
The policy was misguided then, and it is misguided today. Buttressed by economic analysis performed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States, European countries, and other like-minded allies argued against applying the old telecom charging model to the Internet. It is impossible to simply split costs in a system where traffic routing is dynamic.
Europe’s operators, now privately owned, lobbied hard. Heading into the 2012 ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications, the European Telecommunications Networks Operators (ETNO) pushed for a new treaty provision to establish an Internet sending party pays system. Instead of commercially negotiated contracts, OTT Internet providers would pay network operators relative to the content they sent using the telecom operator’s networks.
The US and the various European national governments rejected the idea. European national telco regulators (BEREC) argued it risked “shifting the balance of negotiating leverage between market participants and inducing an abuse of market power by telecoms carriers in relation to terminating traffic (much as occurred historically in traditional telephony).” Even then European Commissioner Neelie Kroes argued against the idea, reminding ETNO that it was the Internet services that drove customer demand.
A decade later, ETNO, is pushing once again for government intervention. While the basic standards of Internet routing remain the same, there is no technological driver for the shift. What’s changed is the politics. Brussels seems determined to reign in Big Tech and ETNO thinks they now have a receptive audience. On May 2, it released a study arguing that Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix accounted for over 56 percent of all global data traffic last year and that an annual contribution from them of €20 billion to network costs could give a €72 billion boost to the EU economy.
Instead of rejecting this old-fashioned argument, leading European politicians expressed sympathy. Commissioner Vestager expressed a willingness to examine issues of fairness related to telecom network development. Commissioner Breton promised to propose a new law mandating revenue sharing.
Will Europe’s national telecom regulators cede authority to the EU’s intergovernmental bureaucracy in an area they have covered for decades? Interestingly, no member of BEREC has come out in support. With most OTT providers targeted by ETNO being US companies, what will be the Biden Administration’s response? If Europe forces US tech to pay telco fees, the policy might spread globally. The ITU might take it up again means to facilitate revenue transfers to the developing world, echoing the old telephone system.
Let’s hope that for the sake of innovation and global connectivity, decision-makers see through this latest ETNO ploy and say no to a return to the outdated regulation of the 1980s. Some things are better off remaining in the past.
Fiona M. Alexander is both a Distinguished Policy Strategist in Residence in the School of International Service and a Distinguished Fellow at the Internet Governance Lab at American University in Washington. She is a former Department of Commerce official, specializing in technology policy.
Credit: Mario Caruso via Unsplash.
WP Post Author
May 12, 2022
Bandwidth is an online journal covering crucial topics surrounding transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
When he came to power, Vladimir Putin ignored the Internet. After discovering its power, he has tried to control it. Now, as he wages war in Ukraine, he wants to suppress it. He must not succeed.
As Russia sends tanks and soldiers to take over Ukraine, it is also dispatching censors and regulators to strangle the Internet. In this special series by the Center for European Policy Analysis, The New Iron Curtain, Senior Fellows Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that both invasions are linked and represent the culmination of more than a decade-long trend to throttle the free and open flow of information in Russia.
In 2009, Google decided it wanted to become number one in Russia.
Local tech star Yandex dominated the search engine market. Yandex was fast to market, bringing maps and other features to Russians well before the Silicon Valley giant. If Google improved its Russian offering, it figured that Yandex could be vanquished. Google hired Russian engineers. It added local content. It signed a deal with local social network Mail.ru.
The effort proved fruitless. Under political pressure, the Mail.ru partnership fell apart. It soon became clear that Google could stay a relevant number two in the Russian search market, but never be allowed to become number one.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 upset this arrangement. In addition to sending troops into the Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin launched an offensive against Silicon Valley platforms. On May 16, 2014, a Roskomnadzor spokesperson, Maxim Ksenzov, attacked Twitter in an interview with Izvestia, the largest pro-Kremlin daily newspaper. “We can tomorrow block Twitter or Facebook in Russia,” Ksenzov said. “It will take a few minutes. We do not see this as a big risk.”
Yet Roskomnador held off. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev opposed a full Twitter shutdown. Instead, starting in 2014, the Kremlin experimented with several tactics trying to force global platforms to cooperate.
On July 4, 2014, the Duma passed a law prohibiting the storage of Russian personal data anywhere but in Russia. Global platforms were required to relocate their servers to Russia by September 1, 2015. Google, Twitter, and Facebook sent high-ranking representatives to Moscow. Although details of their talks were kept secret, all three quietly sabotaged the law. Russian courts doled out fines for noncompliance, but they were too small to force a change.
The Kremlin kept increasing pressure. Of the three platforms, Google felt the most pain. Evgeny Prigozhin, a businessman close to the Kremlin, hired private security officers to spy on its Russian Director of Government Affairs, Marina Zhunich. An antitrust case targeted the Google-owned mobile phone operating system Android, which dominated the Russian market. It was resolved only after Google agreed to replace its search engine with Yandex on all Russian mobile devices.
Twitter came next. In March 2021, Roskomnadzor slowed traffic to the website. It demanded that Twitter take down content the Kremlin considered “harmful,” in particular posts calling on children to take part in the pro-Navalny demonstrations. The slowdown affected every Russian mobile phone and half of laptops and tablets.
The operation was far from surgical. In addition to Twitter, Roskomnadzor accidentally shut down the Kremlin’s website, as well as other government sites.
Western platforms continued to resist. Google refused, for example, to delete videos posted on YouTube by opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The Kremlin responded by increasing fines, imposing a total of $120 million on firms accused of defying censors.
Under such pressure, Western tech’s resistance crumbled. When Twitter’s traffic was slowed in 2021, it acceded to requests to take down “illegal content.” Roskomnadzor announced that Twitter had acceded to 91 percent of its requests for takedowns.
Apple turned off its Private Relay service, designed to encrypt all traffic leaving a user’s device, like an iPhone or an iPad, so that it couldn’t be read if intercepted. Apple had already switched the service off in authoritarian countries such as Saudi Arabia. Now it was Russia’s turn. Silicon Valley took the Twitter slowdown as a sign that the Russian authorities no longer feared a domestic backlash from blocking Western sites.
While upping its attacks on foreign platforms, Roskomnadzor promoted local Russian replacements. Russia’s tech industry is one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors, benefiting from one of the world’s largest engineering communities. To help local tech firms, lawmakers required the pre-installation of many Russian-made apps, starting in 2019. Yandex and Mail.ru own the bulk of Kremlin-required apps. This includes a browser, a cloud computing service, a maps application, a search engine, an instant messenger, and two social networks.
The goal was straightforward: when Russians witnessed something extraordinary – and decided to share the news, video footage, or pictures online – they would post to Russian-made platforms, under strict control of the country’s censors. Starting in 2017, most Russian social media and online services were added to the ‘Register of information distributors’ and required to provide access to the FSB intelligence agency.
For Western firms, the crackdown’s climax came in September 2020, when the Kremlin demanded the removal from Apple and Google app stores of Alexei Navalny’s Smart Voting App. The Smart Voting app selected candidates with the best prospects of beating representatives of Putin’s United Russia party.
Old-fashioned intimidation was deployed. FSB agents visited the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum: take down the app within 24 hours or go to prison, according to the Washington Post. Although Google moved the woman to a hotel, the agents showed up at her room to repeat their warning. Within hours, the Smart Voting app was gone. Apple’s “main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence,” the Post reported.
After invading Ukraine, the Kremlin blocked Twitter and Facebook traffic. A Russian prosecutor branded Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) as an extremist organization. By all indications, the Kremlin will keep upping the pressure on foreign platforms and websites until they are chased out of Russia. As of today, YouTube remains the only major Silicon Valley network still available.
The Kremlin’s censorship extended beyond Silicon Valley. It blocked international media including ВВС, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Liberty as well as independent Russian media including Meduza, Mediazona, Doxa, Echo Moskvy, and TV Rain. The list grows daily. Our own website, Agentura.ru, was blocked on March 18 after we broke a story about purges in the FSB in the wake of their intelligence failures around the Ukraine invasion.
The results of this massive blocking are mixed: Russians, outraged by the introduction of such total censorship, have rushed to install VPN services. Attempts to replace international apps with Russian counterparts are faltering. With their online surveillance and censorship apparatus struggling, Russian authorities are turning to traditional means of suppressing information On March 4, the Duma adopted a new law making it a criminal offense punishable by up to 15 years in jail to spread fakes about military operations, to discredit the armed forces, or to support sanctions against Russia.
During the three days after the law was imposed, police detained 60 people. The majority were journalists. Terrified, almost all independent Russian journalists have ceased covering the war.
Russia’s rhetoric about the Sovereign Internet represents an attempt to justify nationwide censorship. Despite Russia’s strong tradition of high-quality technical education, foreign help has been required to build Russia’s surveillance and censorship apparatus.
Western policy should focus on improving export controls on technologies that could strengthen this censorship and surveillance. Global platforms led by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, should remain available for Russians to share uncensored news and political developments. Western powers should make it a priority to keep global platforms available in Russia.
When he came to power, Vladimir Putin ignored the Internet. After discovering its power, he has tried to control it. Now, as he wages war in Ukraine, he wants to suppress it. He must not succeed.
Andrei Soldatov is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. A Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities, he has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999.
Irina Borogan is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Irina is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and deputy editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
Photo: RYAZAN, RUSSIA – DECEMBER 17, 2020: A live TV broadcast of the 16th annual end-of-year news conference by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at a home appliances store. Credit: Alexander Ryumin/TASS
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April 13, 2022
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A New Iron Curtain: Russia’s Sovereign Internet
As Russia sends tanks and soldiers to take over Ukraine, it is also dispatching censors and regulators to strangle the Internet. In this CEPA special series, Senior Fellows Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that both invasions are linked and represent the culmination of a more than a decade-long trend to throttle the free and open flow of information in Russia.
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Photo: The logo of Russia’s state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, is reflected in a laptop screen in this picture illustration taken February 12, 2019. Credit: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov.
Bandwidth is an online journal covering crucial topics surrounding transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Marine Le Pen is no fan of Big Tech, and her policy proposals would marry tech-lash and protectionism.
The far-right candidate facing off in a close race against President Emmanuel Macron on April 24 wants to clamp down on digital platforms and even create a “free, public social network” if they fail to cooperate with her.
“France and the countries of Europe do not benefit from the sectors’ economic growth as the US and China, crush them,” she complains. Her program denounces digitalization, indeed almost all progress, in strident terms. Tech “deprives us of personal autonomy” by “taking over all the activities that we no longer do ourselves,” it reads.
Incumbent Macron is no tech softie. He led the charge for European tech sovereignty and backed strong EU regulation of the sector. On the election trail this week, he called for “the dismantling” of US tech platforms, comparing their present monopolies to Standard Oil in the 19th century. But Macron has also succeeded in fashioning himself as a tech fan – even wearing a Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck this past February to celebrate the creation of 25 French unicorns, start-ups with a market value above €1 billion each. Under his watch, tech investments in France have soared.
Le Pen shares the right-wing’s fear that Silicon Valley is intent on censoring conservative voices. Digital platforms, governed “by their own rules,” should no longer be able to impose “censorship” on people, she says. Platforms should allow only judges to decide on the removal or non-removal of content. If social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter fail to comply with her demands, Le Pen says she will build a free, public social network.
The far right’s tech sovereignty plan goes beyond content moderation. She wants to counter American dominance by subsidizing French or European champions, offering them both “targeted aid for digital companies,” and by giving priority to French or European suppliers.” Under her watch, only French suppliers will be allowed to bid for public procurement in military and security.
“This preference is in line with existing national and European legislation, but has so far remained unimplemented,” she said. If elected, she wants “strict control “over foreign takeovers of leading French companies.
Data protectionism is another Le Pen priority. She wants to make it compulsory for French public data to be hosted by French or European cloud services. Targeted advertising must be limited. European service providers must also benefit from a “right to process data by default” while foreign operators will have to provide additional guarantees, she added.
To her, crypto is a dirty word and crypto-assets should be heavily regulated.
Gig workers for Uber and other platforms must become employees.
Some of these ideas are not far from the French and European mainstream – and presented as a response to US protectionism. During the French presidential campaign, most candidates endorsed a “Buy European Act” designed to fight on equal terms against the American or Chinese giants. Drawing inspiration from the “Buy American Act”, the “Buy European Act” could allow the EU to bypass free trade rules in order to reserve European companies a share of the public procurement market. We must “strengthen our French or European companies,” said the Green candidate, Yannick Jadot. “All our trading partners are doing it.”
On Le Pen’s right, candidate Éric Zemmour called for the creation of a European public procurement mechanism to set aside a specific share for national companies, particularly in cloud and cybersecurity. On the left, Jean-Luc Mélechon warned that a “Buy European Act” must ensure that the European companies put forward are not clients of US giants, without which “digital sovereignty would only be a chimera.”
During the campaign, Macron came under criticism for favoring US tech, in particular, his decision to allow Microsoft to host the country’s health data. In response, the incumbent toned down his free-market ideas. Macron’s 2022 manifesto aims to “revise the State’s purchasing policy: the main objective will be to buy local, rather than always buying cheaper, in order to develop innovation and the French industries.”
Mathieu Pollet is Euractiv’s France correspondent.
Photo: Marine Le Pen at a campaign rally. Credit: Twitter.
This article was adapted with the author’s approval from EURACTIV. EURACTIV is an independent pan-European media network specialized in EU affairs including government, business, and civil society.
Bandwidth is an online journal covering crucial topics surrounding transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
In May 2019, Vladimir Putin signed new legislation to shut Russians off from information contradicting the Kremlin’s approved narrative. Western technology helped build the censorship apparatus.
As Russia sends tanks and soldiers to take over Ukraine, it is also dispatching censors and regulators to strangle the Internet. In this special series by the Center for European Policy Analysis, The New Iron Curtain, Senior Fellows Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that both invasions are linked and represent the culmination of more than a decade-long trend to throttle the free and open flow of information in Russia.
In Moscow, Internet regulator Roskomnadzor established a central control office at Derbenevskaya Embankment 7 in a renovated 19th-century red-brick building. Called the Center for Monitoring and Control of Public Communications Networks, it counts a staff of 70. Sergey Khutortsev, a former Russian security services officer, became the director.
Rozkomnadzor required Internet service providers to install filters. The ISPs blocked forbidden websites. A Russian organization replaced Internet registrars, assuming control over the Internet registrar and controlling who could host a website. A Russian Domain Name System (NSDI) took over the functions of the global DNS (Domain Name System). Russian Internet service providers are required to provide data on cross-border data transfers and Internet exchange points.
Foreign technology helped build the system. Rozkomnadzor’s monitoring center relies on 30 servers supplied by Chinese-owned Lenovo and 30 more from US company Super Micro Computer Corp. Throughout the country, Roskomnadzor provided Russian Internet services providers with Deep Packet Inspection, supplied by the Israeli firm Silicom Ltd. The Israeli firm sold the devices to RDP.ru, part of Rostelecom, which, under orders from Rozkomnadzor’s censorship center, distributed the technology.
Most digital inspection tools look at the “headers” on a packet of data—where it’s going and where it came from. Intrusive Deep Packet Inspection, a Western technology, filters the entirety of Internet traffic. It allows network providers to peer into the digital packets of the message, reading detail like the website a user is visiting or the content of unencrypted messages. “You open the envelope, rather than not just reading the address on a letter,” explains an engineer dealing with Deep Packet Inspection.
Roskomnadzor’s censorship center not only monitors traffic. It suppresses entire websites– in a particular region or in the entire country. Since the beginning of 2021, Roskomnadzor has demanded that Internet service providers switch to the National Domain Name System (NSDI), as a replacement for the global internet domain system. At the end of 2021, the system controlled 73 percent of overall Internet traffic and 100 percent of the country’s mobile phone traffic.
In June 2021, Roskomnadzor began blocking VPN services that circumvent local restrictions. Opera VPN, a major service, ceased to work, and the company stopped providing service in Russia. In the following months, Roskomnador blocked six additional VPN services.
Roskomnadzor also moved to suppress Tor – encryption software that permits users to bypass locally imposed web restrictions and keeps their searches private. An estimated 300,000 Russians depend on Tor, or about 15 percent of Tor users worldwide. Roskomnadzor announced the blocking in a statement about “the introduction of centralized management in relation to the means of circumventing the restriction of information prohibited by law.”
For Russian censors, Tor represents a powerful symbol. While most technologies designed to avoid censorship were commercial tools, Tor was a political project, developed in the mid-1990s at the US Naval Research Laboratory. In the mid-2000s, the US military released Tor’s code, and the NGO Electronic Frontier Foundation funded Tor developers to continue the project. The Kremlin perceived Tor as a technology developed and maintained by democratic countries to help activists.
Tor long seemed unbeatable, even in Russia. Back in 2014, Moscow challenged the service, offering 3.9 million rubles ($86,000) for research on cracking the software. The effort failed. But Deep Packet Inspection overcame Tor’s formidable defenses. With Russia’s new Internet Curtain in place, the stage was set for a showdown with Silicon Valley’s technology titans.
Andrei Soldatov is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Andrei is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999.
Irina Borogan is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Irina is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and deputy editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
Photo: A protester walks away from the Roskomnadzor’s office in central Saint Petersburg, Russia March 10, 2019. Credit: REUTERS/Anton Vaganov
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April 5, 2022
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Part 5: Russia’s War Against Silicon Valley
When he came to power, Vladimir Putin ignored the Internet. After discovering its power, he has tried to control it. Now, as he wages war in Ukraine, he wants to suppress it. He must not succeed.
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Photo: RYAZAN, RUSSIA – DECEMBER 17, 2020: A live TV broadcast of the 16th annual end-of-year news conference by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at a home appliances store. Credit: Alexander Ryumin/TASS
Bandwidth is an online journal covering crucial topics surrounding transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
In 2017, Russia vowed to make its Internet sustainable and self-sufficient. In reality, the Kremlin undertook its first systematic effort to control its cyberspace.
As Russia sends tanks and soldiers to take over Ukraine, it is also dispatching censors and regulators to strangle the Internet. In this special series by the Center for European Policy Analysis, The New Iron Curtain, Senior Fellows Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that both invasions are linked and represent the culmination of a more than a decade-long trend to throttle the free and open flow of information in Russia.
For years, former KGB generals watched the growth of the Internet with suspicion, believing it was a threat to Russia’s national security. They vowed to disable it.
Their leader was Vladislav Sherstyuk, a career KGB officer. In 1998, he became director of FAPSI, the division of the intelligence service in charge of spying on foreign communications and the protection of the government’s most sensitive networks. The next year, President Putin promoted Sherstyuk to the powerful Security Council, where he supervised the information security department. In 2000, his team composed the ‘Information Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation’, a plan for the future of the Russian internet.
Its doctrine reflects the KGB mindset: the free flow of information, coming from the West, poses a threat to Russia’s national security. Threats ranged from a “devaluation of spiritual values” to a “reduction of the spiritual, moral and creative potential of the Russian population,” as well as the “manipulation of information (disinformation, concealment or misrepresentation).” Putin signed the document, and the Security Council became the ideological center of operations to curb Russian Internet freedom and the force behind the nascent Sovereign Internet.
In November 2017, the Security Council instructed the Ministry of Communications to submit “proposals for the creation and implementation of a state information system to ensure the integrity, stability, and security of the Russian segment of the Internet, as well as replacement root servers for national top-level domain names.” The Security Council warned: “A serious threat to the security of the Russian Federation is the increased capabilities of Western countries to conduct offensive operations in the information space and readiness to use them.”
Officially, the Security Council aimed to make the Russian Internet sustainable end self-sufficient. In fact, the Kremlin wanted to build an effective system of control. The Kremlin identified six challenges to overcome:
During the Cold War, the Kremlin saw the most dangerous content coming from Western media. This content could be found on the Internet, but Russians preferred and trusted domestic content.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s documentaries about Kremlin corruption attracted record YouTube audiences. In 2017, Navalny’s YouTube video about Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s alleged corruption was viewed more than 22 million times. Since then, Navalny’s organization has produced anti-corruption videos on YouTube on an industrial scale. These videos are more popular than content created by Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, or the BBC.
The Kremlin began to pressure both local and Western technology companies to take down opposition content critical to authorities.
When ordinary people witness a natural disaster, a technical catastrophe, or police brutality – and share the evidence – through video or photos — the posts go viral. The information spreads too quickly for the censorship system to address.
The Kremlin began to set up a Moscow control center, giving it the ability to oversee access to the entire Russian Internet.
Censors understand that activists use apps such as Signal or software such as Tor to obscure their communications, but ordinary Russians depend on mainstream consumer apps such as WhatsApp, Viber (a communications app owned by the Japanese company Rakuten), Telegram, and TikTok.
The Kremlin aimed to change reliance on Western apps to local ones that the security services could control and suppress.
YouTube and TikTok’s explosive growth took Russian authorities by surprise. In 2017, Navalny’s documentary about Medvedev’s corruption encouraged Russian YouTubers to spread videos showing police brutality used to crack down on protests. Russian schoolchildren filmed their teachers raging about enemies of the state and posted the videos.
The Kremlin concentrated its censorship efforts on video posts, filing numerous complaints to YouTube about the Navalny videos, and arresting the editor of Navalny Live.
In August 2018, tensions rose in the majority Muslim region of Ingushetia over a Kremlin-supported border-swap agreement with neighboring Chechnya. On the day of the agreement’s signing, about a hundred people gathered to protest in the Ingush capital, Magas.
Ingushetia’s Internet was cut. Authorities suppressed live streaming. In the following weeks, the Ingush kept going to the streets to protest, and the FSB secret service enforced web shutdowns.
Despite the efforts, information about protests kept leaking. The Kremlin’s new system, controlled through a single center in Moscow, was built to shut down the Internet to entire regions, allowing it to act without relying on regional enforcers.
Starting in the 1990s, Russian telecom companies were required to buy and update equipment for online surveillance. Starting in 2018, Russians were obliged to store the complete data of all users for six months, and their metadata for three years.
Telecom companies protested. Sometimes, their resistance became public – company officials expressed their concerns at conferences and to journalists. In most cases, the resistance stayed private. Companies attempted to find a way around the legislation, for instance, by renting surveillance equipment from large operators. This resistance undermined the effectiveness of the Russian nationwide surveillance and filtering.
Kremlin censors realized that they needed to pay companies to install censorship and surveillance tools. They began providing Internet service providers with special equipment which gave the government the means to suppress and redirect the traffic to the control center in Moscow.
The Sovereign Internet was born. It would be built out over the next few years, in advance of the decision to invade Ukraine.
Andrei Soldatov is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Andrei is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999.
Irina Borogan is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Irina is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and deputy editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
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March 30, 2022
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Part 4: Russia’s Sovereign Internet Takes Root
In May 2019, Vladimir Putin signed new legislation to shut Russians off from information contradicting the Kremlin’s approved narrative. Western technology helped build the censorship apparatus.
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Photo: A protester walks away from the Roskomnadzor’s office in central Saint Petersburg, Russia March 10, 2019. Credit: REUTERS/Anton Vaganov
Bandwidth is an online journal covering crucial topics surrounding transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.