Putin's iron firewall is porous

Russians can see more of the Ukraine war after three months than we saw during the entire Vietnam war.

In 1946 Winston Churchill declared that Russia had lowered an iron curtain across Europe and in 2022 Vladimir Putin created an iron firewall between the Russian Internet and media and the rest of the world but, like its precursor, it is porous. Information wants to be free.

As of May 26, Russia had blocked access to 1,548 domains, including 1,142 news sites and 287 digital-resistance sites. The distribution of domain locales is also skewed -- Ukraine 647, the US 523, and Russia 218 are the top three. Given this blocking, it is not surprising that Russians turned to virtual private networks (VPNs).

As shown here, Russian interest in VPNs as measured by Google searches for the term "VPN" has spiked twice.  The baseline level is roughly 5% of the peak period after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The earlier spike -- 26% of the peak -- occurred when the US sanctioned Russia for interference in our 2016 election.

Daily downloads of the ten most popular VPNs

Daily downloads of the 10 most popular VPNs also spiked in the days after Russia invaded and Russians are using those VPNs. Psiphon, a popular VPN, averaged 867,400 unique daily users during the twenty days beginning May 2 and it has risen slowly, but steadily since the invasion to 929,000 on May 27 and the users on May 28 made 4,755,000 connections.

Several messaging services are currently unblocked in Russia. The most surprising to me is Telegram which has around 38 million Russian users visiting it at least once a month. If they have the same level of access as I do, they can see Washington Post coverage of the war, President Zelensky's standing-ovation addresses to parliaments and other important audiences, news and graphic photos, and videos of Russian war crimes. and follow the activities of The Ukrainian IT Army. 

When Russia celebrated Victory in Europe Day, an audacious hack occurred. Hackers placed fake stories on Lenta.ru, a popular Russian news site. The hack was quickly discovered and corrected, but not before the Internet Archive backed it up. Below is a Google Translation of a portion of the hacked front page. Note that the hack went beyond the front page -- each front-page headline linked to a complete article.

Many Ukrainians speak Russian and have friends and family members in Russia. They can use the Internet to tell their friends and families what they have witnessed, and you can do the same using a messaging service created by Squad 103 a group of Polish programmers.

The service, which sent over 100 million messages in less than two months, allows anyone anywhere in the world to message cellphones and email addresses of random Russian individuals and companies. To send a message, you select a messaging application -- SMS, WhatsApp, email, Viber, Telegram, or phone call and write or select an appropriate message.

(I'm not sure how or if it is possible to distinguish between the activity of Squad 103, the Ukrainian IT Army, and Anonymous in Ukraine).

Ukraine is also using facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers who have been captured, killed, or are caught in the act of looting or other war crimes. They follow up by investigating the war crimes and informing the families of dead soldiers. They defend the latter by saying they offer the soldier's families the possibility of claiming the bodies and fighting Russian propaganda, but they say that is effective in only about 20% of the cases.

I've focused on the Internet, but mass media is also vulnerable. The Economist reports that the state controls the country’s television channels, newspapers, and radio stations, giving "guidance" as to what and how to cover. But, despite Putin's efforts, the truth sometimes appears in mass media.

The sign reads "NO WAR. Stop the war. Don't believe
the propaganda. They are lying to you here."

The most theatrical example was when Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of Russia's state TV Channel One, interrupted a live newscast with a handwritten No-War poster. She was arrested, but surprisingly, fined $280 and freed. She is now working as a correspondent for the German Die Welt newspaper, reporting from Ukraine and Russia.

Military analyst & retired colonel Mikhail Khodarenok surprised fellow panelists by arguing with Olga Skabeyeva, the anchor of Russia's “60 Minutes” talk-show program. He said the war was going poorly and would get worse, arguing that a million patriotic Ukrainian soldiers were ready to fight to defend their nation while Russian army morale was low, Russia is geopolitically isolated, and Ukraine was well supplied by the west. My favorite moment in the argument is when Khodaryonok invoked the "classics" of Marxism-Leninism in refuting Skabeyeva when she challenged the professionalism of the Ukraine fighters. Two days later, on the same program, Khodaryonok predicted an ultimate Russian victory.

The most innovative mass-media hack occurred on Victory in Europe Day when every program listing in the online TV guide service was changed to read (in translation) "On your hands is the blood of thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war".

Writing this, I am reminded of the Vietnam war. Criticism of the war was freely available in print and electronic media in the US and public protests were common. It was nothing like Russia today. But the rate and quality of anti-war information reaching Russia today far exceed those of the Vietnam war. 

We saw iconic photographs -- a terrified nine-year-old girl running screaming and naked after she was napalmed or Major General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan calmly shooting a bound prisoner in the head at point-blank range. Equally disturbing photos from Ukraine are posted to Telegram every day. We eventually learned of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam, but Russians can see Mariupol and Bucha today. (Do a Google Image search for Bucha atrocity or go to President Zelensky's Telegram channel and search for Bucha).

Update 7/18/2022

The Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, is supporting three firms that offer their VPN service in Russia for free -  nthLink, Psiphon, and Lantern and it's paying off. On May 27 there were 929,000 unique daily users of the Psiphon VPN in Russia, and it has grown steadily. It was 2.113 million on July 18th.

Update 8/27/2022

To celebrate Ukraine’s Independence Day, dozens of IP cameras with speaker outputs have been hacked to play patriotic music in Russia as well as occupied Crimea and Donbas. Here are a couple of stills from the video.

Optimistic speculation on what Elon Musk might do with Twitter

Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" which leads some to worry that Twitter will be open to the sort of thing one finds at gab.com if his purchase of the company is completed. I have no idea what Musk plans to do with Twitter but let me offer some optimistic speculation.

For a start, I don't believe Musk will use Twitter to advance right-wing candidates or policy. He recently tweeted "I strongly supported Obama for President, but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists." He also tweeted a cartoon showing him not changing his views since he supported President Obama in 2008 while the left and right have diverged. Don't forget that Musk (and many others) resigned from Trump's American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum shortly after they were formed. 

Musk sounds more like a pro-Obama centrist than a right-wing extremist.

The algorithms

Musk has said he wants "to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.” I am all for defeating spambots and authenticating (not "identifying") humans but open sourcing the algorithms that rapidly decide which tweets to present to a given user is insufficient. The goal, the objective function, of current social media algorithms is to increase engagement and therefore advertising revenue and that has had catastrophic side effects.

In the early 1990s, the US National Science Foundation Network, which was central to the nascent global Internet, had a policy limiting acceptable use to supporting open research and education. Most of us were naive when that policy was phased out, but by 2011, when Eli Pariser published The Filter Bubble, the danger of an Internet financed by personalized advertising was becoming clear, and terrorists were using the Internet for operations and recruiting. In 2014 Aljazeera was asking whether Facebook was amplifying hate speech and violence against the Rohingya and there was evidence of Russia hacking US elections as early as 2008. That was nothing compared to subsequent presidential elections or Russia's Ukraine war propaganda. 

The objective function of today's social media algorithms must be changed -- for example by adding goals like reducing political division or increasing voter participation rate. This is an ill-defined, challenging problem, but that is nothing new for Musk. It would also reduce Twitter's revenue and Musk is a businessman, but he is motivated by more than increasing profit and shareholder value.

Musk has the technical skill in his current companies to implement and maintain Twitter algorithms. One of his companies, Neuralink, is working on understanding the brain and SpaceX satellites and Tesla cars rapidly process large amounts of data to make decisions to avoid collisions. He and his employees are well versed in decision-making technology, but he will need people with backgrounds in marketing, social science, and politics to revise the algorithms to incorporate social goals. 

Musk is a manufacturing and design genius and a manager with an unprecedented span of control who is nevertheless deeply involved in project details (as illustrated in this interview), but he lacks the temperament and judgment to revise the Twitter algorithms. (He has described himself as autistic and is prone to unrealistic predictions and sophomoric tweets).

Musk needs trusted advisors if he plans to revise the Twitter algorithms. How about President Obama? He would bring empathy, wisdom, and political skill to the project, and, as evidenced in a recent talk at Stanford University, he understands the problems with today's social media algorithms and considers them to be a threat to democracy as well as causing more concrete damage like killing people by spreading COVID misinformation.

Musk and Obama have complementary skills, and if social media can be modified and saved, I can't think of a better team than them to do it. If Musk is unwilling or unable to engage President Obama as an advisor, how about a podcast like the one Obama did with Bruce Springsteen? Coming back to reality -- Musk should at least invite Obama to visit Twitter and give a talk to and engage with the Twitter staff. 

Update 5/7/2022

I learned something after writing this post that has increased my optimism. 

Twitter has a company-wide initiative called Responsible Machine Learning (ML), based on the belief that "responsible technological use includes studying the effects it can have over time" and the fact that with hundreds of millions of Tweets per day Twitter's design can have unintended consequences. 

Twitter's Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) group is responsible for understanding the impact of ML decisions and applying what they learn to improve Twitter. In 2021, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and the board of directors made Responsible ML one of Twitter's main priorities. META group funding was increased, and prominent researchers were hired. They have access to Twitter's data, the decision-making algorithms, and the people who design them.

But, isn't Elon Musk a "free speech absolutist?"

Yes, he tweeted that, but how much thought went into the tweet, and what exactly does he mean by it? I don't know, but I do know that Musk is iconoclastic and willing to question himself. When speaking or being interviewed, he seems at times to pause, to debate with himself before making a statement or giving an answer. During a recent in-depth interview, he listed his engineering principles, beginning with a recognition that “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.”

I can't think of any team better qualified to mitigate social media dysfunction than Twitter's META group, the technicians with access to the current algorithms and data, and Elon Musk. (And maybe President Obama).

Finally, here is a little more optimistic speculation:

Jack Dorsey: 

• Called Musk "the singular solution he trusts".

Bill Gates:

• “You wouldn’t want to underestimate Elon. What he did at Tesla is amazing, helping with climate change, what he did at SpaceX ..."
• “I don’t know specifically what he’ll do, but there’s an opportunity, and we need innovation in that space.”

Elon Musk: 

• “The goal that I have, should everything come to fruition with Twitter, is to have a service that is as broadly inclusive as possible, where ideally most of America is on it and talking.”
• "I don't care about economics at all.