In the past year, the Russian and global Internet experienced a lot of turmoil: social networks and Russian hackers allegedly interfered in the U.S. presidential election, and some countries tried to restrict access to anonymous services. “Lenta.ru” recalled five key events of 2016 that seriously affected the future fate of the global network.
Russia adopted the Yarovaya package
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an anti-terrorist package of laws by State Duma deputy Irina Yarovaya and Senator Viktor Ozerov. Despite protests from leading IT companies, mobile operators and the Internet community, the document was approved by the Duma in all three readings, and its authors, according to Lenta.ru’s sources, not only failed to take into account the amendments proposed by market participants, but did not consult them at all.
The Yarovaya Package was heavily criticized for violating the constitutional rights of citizens, because its authors obliged social networks, messengers and telecom operators to store all data about users for six months and provide access to them at the request of intelligence services. Moreover, the companies were required to provide government agencies with tools to decrypt the protected services.
The Internet community was much more discontented not even by the government’s attack on network privacy, but by the prohibitive costs of complying with the legislative requirements. MegaFon estimated the costs at 20.8 billion dollars, Vimpelcom at 18 billion dollars, and MTS at 22.7 billion dollars. By the way, in 2015, the Big Three and Tele2 earned 17.8 billion dollars. Mail.Ru Group estimated that the installation of the necessary equipment will cost the company 2 billion dollars.
Experts pointed out that due to the huge costs of renting servers and installing equipment, investments in the expansion of 4G networks and the introduction of 5G, the development of the Internet of Things and research in the field of artificial intelligence and neural networks will be reduced. Even the 2018 FIFA World Cup has been jeopardized.
In response, the FSB proposed to use SORM equipment already installed on the networks of telecom operators and Internet service providers. The law enforcers decided to expand the so-called ring buffer of data storage from 12 hours to 6 months, as well as to add the function of recording phone conversations and SMS, which was supposed to significantly reduce the cost of enforcing the law.
However, the agency did not specify at whose expense it is planned to build an expensive infrastructure for data storage, because to record all conversations, correspondence, photos and videos will require a huge secure storage. In addition, the FSB will have to modernize its software and create a system for searching and analyzing information, because today, to access a particular record in the ring buffer it is necessary to scroll through the entire array of data.
The law enforcers also have problems with obtaining encryption keys for Internet services. The FSB still does not understand how and where they will be stored, and the mechanism of their collection is still unclear.
But the most important thing is that if Russian social networks and messengers comply with the requirements of the Yarovaya Package, Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram are likely to ignore them, as has already happened with the transfer of Russians’ data to servers located in the country.
Interestingly, in late November, Britain passed a “sniffer law” partially reminiscent of the Yarovaya package, prepared with the active participation of Prime Minister Theresa May. It obliges Internet providers to keep the history of users’ website visits for a year, gives intelligence agencies the right to hack into their computers and wiretap members of parliament without the prime minister’s authorization. The “sniffer law” is rumored to be based on British developments on the analog of the PRISM project, which was exposed by former NSA and CIA contractor Edward Snowden.
Fake news on Facebook has caused confusion in the U.S. election
In late August, Facebook fired most of its news editors and announced that going forward, the list of popular news stories would be created using a special algorithm. Since then, it has been automatically compiled by the program based on the number of mentions of a certain topic, as well as the number of reposts and likes of a particular user.
The head of the News Feed development team Will Cathcart emphasized at the time that Facebook was not interested in pursuing any editorial policy and spreading the subjective opinion of its editors to the whole world.
A couple of months later, the algorithm began to fail, and fake news with a blatantly pro-Trump character began to appear at the top of the News Feed. Users around the world read that the Pope allegedly supported Trump’s candidacy and that Hillary Clinton was supplying weapons to Islamists and suffering from an incurable disease.
As a result, in the last months of the US election campaign, fake news about presidential candidates overtook real publications of reputable publications in terms of reader engagement. Despite the best efforts of social network administrators, the 20 most popular fake news stories garnered about 8.5 million likes, reposts and comments on Facebook, while the 20 most popular media articles garnered just over seven million.
Surprisingly, even after Trump won the presidential election, the creators of fake news not only did not leave the Democrats alone, but also accused their leaders of organizing a pedophile lobby at a popular Washington, D.C. pizzeria. As a result, the Internet exploded with hundreds of thousands of angry comments, posts and videos – Americans once again blindly trusted Facebook’s news feed. Some even took up arms to investigate the “global conspiracy theory” on their own.
Having denied that Trump won the election precisely because of fake news, Facebook promised to deal with the problem. According to Mark Zuckerberg, his employees will create an algorithm to automatically detect false information. At the same time, Facebook will have to move away from the concept of trusting its users, because previously content was removed only after their complaints.
The social network also plans to turn to third-party organizations to check the plausibility of publications and even introduce a special marker “lie” . Finally, the distributors of such materials promise to close access to Facebook’s advertising exchange. But so far the company has not taken any specific actions to combat fake news.
It is worth noting that changes in Facebook’s algorithms will not affect news in the Russian segment of the social network, because the Trending News function does not apply to Russian-language articles posted in domestic media.
Russian hackers were blamed for everything
This year, according to the Western press, legendary Russian hackers literally sealed the fate of the world. Democrats believed that cybercriminals on the orders of the Kremlin chose the new president of the United States and took away a fair victory from Hillary Clinton. Judging by numerous statements, in the intervals hackers from Russia break the Pentagon and FBI websites, empty American and European banks and manage the situation in Ukraine and Syria.
In particular, the story of the Fancy Bear hacker group’s leaks received worldwide publicity: unknown people hacked into the ADAMS anti-doping system and began disclosing lists of athletes who used banned drugs for therapeutic purposes. The disclosures concerned American tennis players Serena and Venus Williams, gymnast Simone Biles, tennis player Rafael Nadal and many others.
The same group was accused of hacking into Democratic Party servers during the election race. The publication of Clinton’s Chief of Staff John Podesta’s emails in October this year caused a storm of indignation – Podesta himself, followed by the head of US National Intelligence James Clapper, openly accused the Russian government of interference.
At the same time, none of them provided any evidence and referred only to the fact that the hackers hit targets that allegedly favor the Russian government. The Kremlin has traditionally denied such accusations.
Experts often point to the fact that Cyrillic characters occasionally slip through in malicious programs, and the hackers’ English is noticeably lame. Most of the malware is probably written either by Russian-speaking crooks or residents of the post-Soviet space, but no one has yet established direct links between the Kremlin and the allegedly hired hackers.
While some Russian hackers are succeeding in politics, others are quietly making money legally. In America, against the background of the already constant fear of Russian-speaking hackers, offices specializing in information security of private companies are gaining popularity.
One of the most famous is created by former criminals. A team of the most notorious fraudsters with multimillion-dollar embezzlements to their credit was assembled by Lawyer Bukh. In the past, the enterprising lawyer helped Russians move to the U.S., then built up a reputation on the most scandalous cases and decided to play on the fear of Americans, providing them with the most experienced hackers who can not only penetrate any system, but also protect it.
The U.S. has lost control of the Internet
In October, the contract between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Corporation for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expired. The contract dates back to 1998 and was regularly renewed, and all ICANN’s actions were formally coordinated with US officials. Moreover, they had the right to veto any decisions of the organization – however, they never used it.
Nevertheless, possible U.S. influence on ICANN caused serious concerns of Russia and China, who believed that in case of a sharp aggravation of the foreign policy situation, the Americans could disrupt the work of the Internet or take away top-level domains – for example, Russian .ru or Chinese .cn.
American congressmen traditionally covered themselves with national security issues and insisted on maintaining control over ICANN. In the end, the situation was resolved by US President Barack Obama, who supported the decision of the Internet corporation not to extend the contract with the government.
Now the global network will be managed by a special structure consisting of representatives of ICANN government committee member countries, experts and employees of the Internet industry.
The world is increasingly blocking Tor and messengers
Residents of Turkey, Belarus, Brazil and many other countries have already gotten used to periodically losing access to social networks. In case of terrorist attacks or any popular unrest, the government promptly blocks Facebook and Twitter. In this way, the authorities supposedly curb the spread of false information, although more often than not they are just trying to stop communication between users.
However, in 2016, many countries announced a hunt for secure services and means to bypass blocked resources.
Thus, Belarus and Turkey are largely guided by the experience of China, where the authorities are constantly improving the national Internet filter, known as the “Golden Shield”. Belarus, for example, has mastered the method used in the Celestial Empire at the earliest stages of establishing control over the Internet. In December 2016, the country began to interfere with the packets transmitted over the network, which leads to frequent connection failures.
Turkey decided to go even further and attempted to shut down access to the anonymous Tor network. Residents of the country can no longer download the browser of the same name and access the darknet directly, and the government is actively blocking the so-called “bridges” – entry nodes of the network, published on the official website of the project. In response, Tor Network traditionally opens new “bridges” and informs its users about them.
The messengers WhatsApp, Telegram and, since some time ago, Snowden’s favorite application Signal are also periodically subjected to persecution. And in different countries, the authorities often focus on fighting only one messenger, and the residents immediately start using another. For example, WhatsApp and Telegram are exchanging audiences in this way: in Brazil, there is a clear dislike for Mark Zuckerberg’s messenger, while in Iran they are trying to get rid of Durov’s app.
Signal was first blocked in December in Egypt and the UAE. Developers found out that the problem arises due to filtering at the level of mobile operators. For what reasons the governments of these countries decided to restrict access to the not the most popular app is still unclear, but such precedents clearly play into the hands of Signal, which builds its audience solely on Snowden’s compliments.
Source : https://lenta.ru/articles/2016/12/26/internetyear/