Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [125]
A few months later, the Russian government announced that Mail.ru Group’s CEO Dmitry Grishin would serve as a member of the League of Internet Safety, newly formed under the auspices of the Ministry of Communications and led by its Minister Igor Shchyogolev. The league’s primary purpose is to fight against child pornography and, eventually, other “negative” content by recruiting thousands of volunteers to act as informal Internet police. The likelihood that such a system will be used to restrict freedom of expression—which is currently found on RuNET— has not gone unnoticed by Russian journalists and bloggers, who fear it will lead to the same kind of censorship that occurs in China.[66]
The Facebook Revolution
If the Tulip Revolution of 2005 caused Vladislav Surkov to take steps to make sure that the Orange Revolution would not come to Russia, imagine the impact that the social media-fueled revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon are having on the Kremlin. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev succinctly expressed his view on that topic at a session of the National Counter-Terrorism Committee in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia on February 22, 2011: “They prepared such a scenario for us previously. And now they will try to put it into practice. But, in any case, this scenario will not succeed.”
President Medvedev did not specifically identify the “they” during the discussion; however, Russian press quickly tied the “they” to Russian unease over the West’s role in the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in the 2000s. The Russian press—The Moscow Times being the most prominent—pointed to increased discussion on Russian regime change taking place on LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. The Moscow Times noted that all three are believed to have served as mobilizing tools for protesters in North Africa, especially in Egypt.
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin endorsed The Moscow Times’ views by naming Google as a force behind the regime change in Egypt. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Minister Sechin said: “One should examine closer the events in Egypt, to look into what high-profile Google managers had been doing in Egypt, what kind of manipulations with the people’s energy had taken place there.”
The most expansive view, however, is that espoused by Militia Major-General Vladimir Ovchinsky (former Chief of the Russian Interpol Bureau, and current adviser to the Russian Federation Constitutional Court Chairman) in a March 3, 2011 interview with Moscow Komsomolskaya Pravda Online. According to General Ovchinsky, the cyber aspects of recent events were orchestrated by the heads of major Western technology companies to support the Obama Administration’s political objectives. General Ovchinsky insinuates that a “secret” White House luncheon with the heads of Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Netflix, and Oracle held after Mubarak’s resignation celebrated recent American success. According to General Ovchinsky, the US President was expanding on Internet techniques developed during his 2008 campaign: “Barack is striking while the iron is hot and is hastening, with the assistance of modern technology, to extend his Tunisian-Egyptian victory to other countries of the region and further across the world.”
In response, according to a March 2, 2011 St. Petersburg Times article,[67] the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) are proposing Criminal Code amendments making the owners of online social networks responsible for content posted on their sites. The article states that the amendments would force sites to record internal passport data for each registration,