Ubiquitous digital authoritarianism simmers beneath the bifurcated geopolitical system unfolding in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Under unprecedented sanctions from the West, Russia will only fall deeper into China’s hands that will have repercussions for a new world order, the contours of which are already visible. It is a fallacy to gauge the depth of the China-Russia alliance in rerouted energy flows, ambitious agreements to bolster infrastructural capabilities, or even Beijing’s eagerness to circumvent secondary sanctions to supply Moscow with weapons. The gravity of Beijing’s dominance over Moscow can be gauged by seeing how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has executed and cemented its reach into Moscow’s information control apparatus. Today, that apparatus is the backbone of Kremlin’s statecraft.
And that should get India worried. It casts doubt on how far and how long sensitive communication and transaction with Russia can remain unscathed by Chinese spying, regardless of what Moscow wants.
Contrasting models of hegemony
The “end of history” led the United States to embark upon its ‘unipolar’ moment. In pursuit to paint the world with a liberal democratic brush, the US found itself rummaging for global hegemony through unending wars, bloodshed, and unsuccessful attempts at installing democracies. Whereas its major rival China has stayed away from military debacles so far.
Among other capabilities, Beijing has quietly devised and executed strategies to set up the most sophisticated system of surveillance, digital authoritarianism, and espionage not only over its own people but against the rest of the world as well. The unethical use of technology is an integral part of the CCP’s economic statecraft, particularly through networks like the Digital Silk Road (DSR). Platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and TikTok and Chinese tech giants, including Beidou and Huawei, create and store databases on which China’s digital authoritarianism thrives.
This set of strategies and technologies is very much cardinal to China’s “no-limits” friendship with Russia.
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Kremlin’s panopticonic gaze
Kremlin’s first tangible crackdown on information closure and surveillance started with a presidential decree months after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. In the same year, an inconspicuous Russian agency, Roskomnadzor, the country’s internet and media regulator, was formed. Doubling up as a surveillance machine, this ‘internet blocker’ agency has emerged as the star performer in the ongoing Ukraine war. It has blocked more than 1.2 million URLs and has been instrumental in censoring Facebook, Twitter, and Google, among others, since the war with Ukraine started in February 2022.
The famed exodus of approximately several hundred journalists from Russia has also been caused by the crackdown unleashed by Roskomnadzor.
In a CCP-style manoeuvring of 24/7 surveillance over its citizens’ internet communication and behaviour, the agency has also reportedly been using a secret monitoring system to identify activities pertaining to the ‘destabilisation’ of Russian State and society. Federal Security Service’s internet surveillance system, SORM-3, will be expanding scrutiny by threatening telecom users to cancel their licenses if they fail to install the software on their devices. The New York Times’ report of leaked Roskomnadzor documents shows that Russia’s internet censor has been instrumental in shaping a conducive domestic information environment to steer favourable opinion as the Ukraine war goes on.
Roskomnadzor’s emergence as the most potent tool for information blackouts and mass surveillance in 2022 has roots in a series of restrictive laws, introduced from 2012 onwards, which have laid down an enabling legal framework around censorship.
For more than a decade, President Vladimir Putin has been building the Russian version of the Great Firewall of China by incorporating its elements into the Red Web, the country’s internet filtering and control system.
As Russia stood shunned by the G7 for its actions in Crimea in 2014, Xi Jinping exploited the wedge between the West and Moscow by offering the latter the most sensitive of State-domain information control and surveillance tools. Kremlin’s aim to reclaim influence in its post-USSR neighbourhood unravelled with Moscow controlling information and mass surveilling its subjects in line with the official narrative of Russian statecraft. Russia’s pursuit swayed the regime into the experienced hands of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has had one of the most advanced digital authoritarianism paraphernalia in the world. In 2015, Russia and China signed an extensive cybersecurity pact under which the two countries promised not to hack each other, reserving their formidable cyber prowess for ‘predictable’ adversaries.
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The China-Russia ‘dark’ proximity
In the summer of 2016, Russian conservative lawmaker Irina Yarovaya drafted a ‘reform’ package as part of wider anti-terror legislation. The set of two widely criticised federal laws, thereon called the Yarovaya Laws, forced mobile and internet companies to log peoples’ text messages, phone conversations, and chats for six months and hand over the data to security services if ordered by the courts.
A few months later, the next phase of an unprecedented China-Russia cyber collaboration began.
The massive amounts of data generated by Yarovaya’s brainchild required befitting storage and processing capabilities that, by no means, could Russia have boasted of in 2016. After all, this was right after the first wave of technological sanctions by the West in the aftermath of the Crimean invasion.
With an eye on enhancing regime stability and legitimacy, the Yarovaya laws paved the way for Russia’s collaboration with Chinese Great Firewall security officials to implement its data retention and filtering infrastructure.
These laws created the internet blacklist registry, managed by the Roskomnadzor, and mandated service providers to block access to any objectionable site. From 2012 to 2021, Google received 2,34,000 requests for the removal of about three million items from Russia alone. Perhaps it is safe to extrapolate why Google was banned in the first month after the Ukraine war.
Similarly, the 2013 Federal Law 389-FZ, with an uncanny resemblance to China’s multi-pronged crackdown diktat, has given Russia’s prosecutor general the power to take down sites that encourage mass riots, extremist activities, or participation in unsanctioned public events. It was under this law that Apple and Google were forced to remove a tactical voting app, which followers of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny used to express discontentment with the regime.
A few years later, the 2019 “sovereign internet law” gave government officials the power to pull the plug on the internet if needed.
By the end of 2021, Russian courts had already started targeting tech giants such as Alphabet, the parent company of Google, penalising it with a $98 million fine and Meta with a $27 million fine for repeatedly failing to delete illegal content. As Facebook and Twitter prepared to leave Russia, two subsidiaries from Russia’s State-owned gas company Gazprom — Gazprom-Media and SOGAZ (insurance company) — took over the nation’s largest social media network VKontakte, enabling direct State control over other networks.
In line with the Chinese model, the singular objective of Russian firewalling is to curtail dissent and strengthen the stability and legitimacy of the regime. But easy access to sensitive State information by actors like Huawei opens up a Pandora’s Box of likely security breaches.
Huawei—shunned by West, resurrected by Kremlin
The deterioration in Russia’s relations with the West after 2014 created new opportunities for Huawei. In retaliation to Western sanctions, Putin signed a series of laws aimed at technologically decoupling Russia from the West. As the Donald Trump administration imposed restrictions on Huawei in 2019, the technology corporation shifted its investments to Russia. It was launched after an agreement was signed between Xi and Putin.
Under Huawei’s assistance, Russia has started deploying mandatory black boxes. These systems intercept and monitor connections and collect data as required; they are also used by government agencies to block websites on the internet registry blacklist.
The Chinese tech giant has been instrumental in helping Russia make its own digital iron curtain, which is the cornerstone of Kremlin’s strategy to perpetuate its narrative today.
A recent French report on China’s influence operations revealed Huawei’s close relationship with the CCP, and the latter’s use of State-owned and private companies to collect vast amounts of data globally. This paints a vexing picture.
The first casualty of any war is truth. While the truth remains elusive and entwined with respective war aims, what is tangible is the development and deployment of State machinery in censoring information that dispute the State narrative. While no government can be completely absolved of not spying on citizens’ information and communication, autocratic regimes do it with absolute authority and justification to a degree that is incomparable with their democratic counterparts.
India has already seen a surge in China-backed cyberattacks. Huawei and ZTE are under scrutiny in India for allegedly installing ‘backdoor’ vulnerabilities to spy for the Chinese government. Does India have standalone capabilities lest Huawei’s spying is rerouted through Russia’s channels? Therein, perhaps, lies another lesson for New Delhi to fortify vital information.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laee)