Russia has built a national infrastructure for Internet censorship based on commodity DPI hardware deployed at thousands of ISPs across the country. We, @CensoredPlanet, fear other nations with similar network topologies will follow Russia’s blueprint. #russia #censorship (1/9)
@CensoredPlanet To study the rise of decentralized information control, we performed an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms underlying censorship in Russia. Our detailed report is here: censoredplanet.org/russia.
Here are some key takeaways: (2/9)
Here are some key takeaways: (2/9)
@CensoredPlanet We collaborated Russian activists and obtained five leaked snapshots of Russia’s blocklist, which is distributed to ISPs by Roskomnadzor, the government authority in charge of nationwide censorship that maintains this real-time authoritative blocklist. (3/9)
@CensoredPlanet Activists have maintained a GitHub repo that tracks nearly hourly updates to this blocklist for past 7 years. The size of the blocklist has grown rapidly since 2012, and Roskomnadzor has started to better maintain it in the past year. (4/9)
@CensoredPlanet The current blocklist contains 170,000 domains, 1,681,000 IPs, and 39 subnets. It has around 10x more websites than Citizen Lab’s curated blocklist for all countries combined. Even with a list this big, our measurements show that ISPs are successful at blocking the sites. (5/9)
@CensoredPlanet We ran measurements from over 1,000 residential, data center, and infrastructure vantage points in ISPs that cover over 65% of Russian IP space. Our findings suggest that data centers block differently from residential ISPs, both in quantity and in method of blocking. (6/9)
@CensoredPlanet Our residential vantage points experience high levels of censorship. ISPs are surprisingly transparent about this blocking: they often inject notices to tell users when censorship is enforced, based on guidelines dictated by Roskomnadzor. (7/9)
@CensoredPlanet Russia’s censorship architecture is a blueprint, and perhaps a forewarning of how national censorship policies could be implemented in many other countries that have similarly diverse ISP ecosystems to Russia’s. (8/9)
@CensoredPlanet As more countries like UK and India require ISPs to deploy DPI for purposes of copyright enforcement or filtering pornography, we risk a slippery slope where Russian-style censorship could easily be deployed. (9/9)
@CensoredPlanet A selfie of us working on Russia paper at deadline night. Shout out to @reethika_, @mathemonkey, @ramakrishnan13s, @umbernhard, Victor Ongkowijaya, @StevenSprecher, Muhammad Ikram, @annie_edmundson for all the hard work to make this happen! #CensoredPlanet #NDSS2020 
