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Censorship Encryption Government

Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail (techcrunch.com) 98

Posted by BeauHD from the sneaky-bastards dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company's chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

In all, 26 internet addresses were blocked by the order, including several servers used to scramble the final connection for users of Tor, an anonymity network popular for circumventing censorship. Internet providers were told to implement the block "immediately," using a technique known as BGP blackholing, a way that tells internet routers to simply throw away internet traffic rather than routing it to its destination. But the company says while the site still loads, users cannot send or receive email. The way the KGB blocked ProtonMail is "particularly sneaky," ProtonMail chief executive Andy Yen said. "ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."

"That's because the two ProtonMail servers listed by the order are its back-end mail delivery servers, rather than the front-end website that runs on a different system," adds TechCrunch.
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Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail More

Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail

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  • It's OK. (Score:5, Funny)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday March 11, 2019 @11:32PM (#58258408)
    It's OK. Putin said it was fine. He's the best!

    - Donnie

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sorry, but Donnie is too busy sucking Putin's tiny wee wee 24 x 7 x 365.

  • "ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox."

    So, basically, Russians can still send and recieve encrypted email no problem .... they just can't send it to Russian mail servers.

    Wtf is the point of that? Trying to drive their own email providers out of business? Or is it just a really silly oversight?

    • The point is, of course, to attack the weakest link first, just like in the West, the authorities dealt with the "IP theft" service providers first, because it is a lot easier, as they are public, and on their own.

      What will happen is that the Russians who don't care about encryption (the majority) will move on to government-sanctioned providers who work. The ability of the rest are not a concern for the Russian government. They will either move to a more "personal" solution, which will make them easier to i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re 'Wtf is the point of that?"
      What can Russia do about encrypted providers well out side any network that can be seen?
      Send over an internationally accepted court request and wait for a real ip to be uncovered and sent back?
      Ask police in another nation to investigate? What other nation?
      Find the nation with that ip range and ask police to investigate?
      The really simple way around this is to make the person change email providers.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Not everything is about you.

        A lot of Russias "external" politics is just the internal politics leaking.
        If Putin retires he will be murdered and his assets taken by someone else.
        He has also bled the country dry so he needs to constantly deflect and project.
        The war in Ukraine wasn't caused by some international conflict, it was just that Putin needed an external enemy to unite against.

        His opposition being able to communicate freely is a problem for him. That is why he is working to make Russian internet more

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jon3k ( 691256 )

          If Putin retires he will be murdered and his assets taken by someone else.

          Solution is simple. First, you find a successor. Someone who you generally trust from your inner circle. Then, you enter into a highly illegal act with this person, covertly. Both of you retain evidence of this event. Now you retire. If anything happens to you or your family, the information is released publicly. Then, you give your successor no good reason to go after you. When you can, you offer public support for them, but basically just lay low and enjoy retirement. Nothing to gain from killing

          • The think the Russians can point to a lot of counterfactual experience where this didn't work so well. They managed to take down Beria in spite of all his power and influence, Khruschev lived as a virtual prisoner after being deposed.

            The best retirement plan is probably negotiating some kind of political asylum in a third country. Build a giant condo project in Brazil under some kind of corporate front, and then move into the top 5 floors as some kind of high-rise secure compound. Cut a deal with the hos

  • Is it still 1991?

    • The way the KGB blocked? Is it still 1991?

      They meant "the former KGB," now the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The KGB ceased to exist, at least in name, in 1991.

    • Obviously, the goal here to make a link between FSB and the soviet era KGB, just in case if there are people who don't think that FSB is not evil enough. I don't understand why this is necessary considering that FSB has built itself a pretty fearsome reputation in the post-Soviet era. I think that constantly pointing out that FSB is the new KGB is stupid. For one, KGB combined both foreign and domestic intelligence functions of USSR, while FSB is primarily a domestic intelligence agency (the Russian agency
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Email is just a bad protocol (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All the open protocols (web, email, news) are relics from the internet's academic roots.
    We're going to need new protocols hardened against increasingly illiberal western states. ...Secure open protocols ...Widely adopted

    Yeah, the internet is fucking toast. It was nice while it lasted.

  • Since I have an unlimited number of backdoored cipher & hashing algorithms, and these governments would actually value my work.

    Then we just stage some stunt claiming that NSA has backdoored RSA, etc. NIST ciphers and hashes -- or simply demonstrate the proof that prime numbers leave signatures of their harmonic footprint in the modulo bit field, and all such crypto is now useless. And then introduce a new cipher standard with new backdoors in place. Then all the plebs can go back to thinking their sh

  • more than that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @01:22AM (#58258742) Homepage Journal

    Russian parliament passed new laws [slate.com] to punish people for 'spreading fake news' and for insulting government officials, national symbols, history, etc. [cbsnews.com]

    Basically it is now illegal to do any investigative journalism based on this law because the moment you say anything about anything you can be immediately, based on a complaint from anybody actually, without any court order (no court order will be required even though in Russia courts are completely useless, bought and paid for, under complete 100% control of the government and of putin) be blocked, fined, thrown to prison.

    No court order is required and the information can (and must be) immediately blocked (by all local Russian ISPs), no court order is required and a person can be fined (there is a progressive scale of fines, repeat offenders also get higher and higher fines), no court order is required but a person can be thrown into prison.

    The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

      Well it may have technically been legal before, but journalists have had a habit of accidentally leaping of high balconies of hotels they never even visited. The 7.62mm holes were caused when glorious agents of the <s>KGB</s>FSB valiantly tried to save them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 )

      Thank God we aren't falling for that "need to regulate fake news" stuff here in the West!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwymanm ( 627857 )
      We don't have to fight Russia. It's just going to destroy itself apparently.

    • bought and paid for, under complete 100% control

      Yes, when you buy something you also get control over it. Anything else is theft.

    • The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.

      When you are thousands of miles away from any place where a law you disagree with can be enforced, it is really easy to encourage people to disregard it. When you have actual skin in the game and your own future is on the line, it becomes a totally different matter. Maybe you should instead be encouraging people to do something that you would actually be willing to do yourself if you were in their shoes.

  • A Great Tribute for ProtonMail (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The Russian intelligence services in general and Vladimir Putin in particular are no strangers to best practices of security. They have blocked ProtonMail because they know that it's cryptographically secure and they have little chance of compromising the physical security of the servers in Switzerland, which are located in a underground ex-military bunker. This should be taken as evidence that ProtonMail security is genuine and indeed a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

  • consequences (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cederic ( 9623 ) on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @04:34AM (#58259152) Journal

    In other news, Proton Mail users are enjoying surprisingly lower rates of spam this morning.

  • Email Threats Sent to Schools (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

    If the police were able to read the threats were those emails actually encrypted and the encryption broken by the police?

  • Fast moving towards North Korea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:14AM (#58259224) Homepage

    A crackdown on the open Internet in Russia continues unabated. Soon, RosKomNadzor [wikipedia.org] will introduce state issued mandatory SSL certificates for opening websites and forbid all the instant messengers which sport unbreakable encryption. Yes, they failed banning Telegram but it was only because there's no law to deal with fast moving targets - Durov revamped the entire servers network and logging in process to allow the Russians to communicate past the prohibition introduced last year.

    It's the fourth such news piece in the last several months. Also most western media neglected the protests [bbc.com] in regard to the Internet in Russia which happened just two days ago. It's still astonishing how few people participated. Looks like Putin has truly become the Tsar of The Grand Duchy of Moscow and the people are content with each [wikipedia.org] atrocity [wikipedia.org] he [wikipedia.org] does [wikipedia.org]. A dictator, a tyrant, Godfather [wikipedia.org] of the Russian mafia state.

    • It's still astonishing how few people participated

      Because most people don’t give a crap about privacy, or think that encryption is for criminals only. “I have nothing to hide”. And those people are often not against a little censorship either, of course only terrorism and kiddie porn at first, then regular porn, then populist agitators (or the opposition, as the case may be). Then degenerate culture. And so on. That’s not just how it works in Russia, much of Europe is the same.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Although the prevalence of embarrassing data leaks seems to be waking some people up to the importance of privacy and security...

    • Looks like Putin has truly become the Tsar of The Grand Duchy of Moscow and the people are content with each [wikipedia.org] atrocity [wikipedia.org] he [wikipedia.org] does [wikipedia.org]. A dictator, a tyrant, Godfather [wikipedia.org] of the Russian mafia state. Your linking to wikipedia articles "documenting" "Putin's atrocities" only paints you as someone who knows very little about Russia besides a few western-liberal headlines. Sorry but the victims of Al-queda-linked terrorists are not an example

      • someone who knows very little about Russia besides a few western-liberal headlines

        Or maybe I live in this country and know a little bit more than you could imagine by reading God knows what. Have you ever been to Russia, mr. guacamole? I really doubt that. Maybe you can understand the Russian language? Also unlikely. Maybe you've got a first person account of the state of corruption, lawlessness (to be precise we have law but it mostly serve the very rich and the members of the distinct dacha housing cooper [wikipedia.org]

        • Also, have a look at the state of corruption in the country as seen by its own citizens [wikimedia.org]. And that was in 2009. As of 2019 the situation is a even worse [transparency.org].
          • I never questioned that Russia was not corrupt. Russia was corrupt for the whole of its history since the foundation by the viking nobility a thousand years ago, with perhaps the exception of a brief period of Stalin rule when a peasant was sent to GULAG for stealing a potato from state farm. That Russia is corrupt and that Putin's buddies are rich and getting richer was never a secret. After all, Putin was appointed by corruptioner-in-law and very authoritarian Mr Yeltsin (who is strangely remembered by we
        • I called you out for your deception for making tall tale statements and then linking to a bunch of irrelevant ENGLISH wiki articles as proof but you only reply with a bunch of drivel including links to other bunch of websites, and also with pompous claims about where you live and what languages you know. Yes, we know Russia is very corrupt. We know its rank in the corruption index. This still does not justify stupid statements with a bunch of Wikipedia links that not even superficially prove what you said.
    • Putin is just a figurehead rubberstamping all this insanity. Only dumb people need one, particular person to rally against, thus any anti-Putin propaganda is by definition exists to manipulate dumb people. Nobody with good intentions would ever use dumb and misinformed people as agent of change. It only creates more chaos. As such anti-Putin rhetoric can't be used for promoting net freedom in Russia. People who would buy it would by definition not care about Internet and other nerdery like that.

  • This is all the endorsement I need. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @08:57AM (#58259984)

    Been thinking about getting some kind of encrypted email and move off the "normal" email providers.

    That russia banned protonmail is a good endorsement for the product. I may go with them. If a totalitarian hates it is must be good!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwymanm ( 627857 )
      It'd be funny if the rest of the world started using ProtonMail BECAUSE Russia blackholed themselves from it hah! Imagine seeing countries say it's the only safe mail service from Russia hacking and has their full recommendation.
      • And imagine if Proton was actually being run by Russian operatives, who by blackholing it from their own people convinced everyone else in the world that it was secure and they all started using it, thus funneling all sensitive email through Russian hands by default. Ochen xorosho, tovarich.

  • How am I gonna correspond with all those beautiful Russian brides now ??

  • Black hole mails you.

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