The USA completely controls the Runet
The United States can block any Russian website if it wishes.
LDPR deputy Andrei Lugovoi announced this today in the Russian State Duma, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
As an example, he cited the blocking of the SSL certificate of the website of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation in June 2018 by the American company GeoTrust under the pretext that the chamber was “affiliated with the DPR, which is under the sanctions of the US Office of Foreign Assets Control.” Russian certification authorities that issue their own SSL certificates are not preinstalled in operating systems and standard browser settings, and therefore users who access a site with such a certificate receive a notification about an insecure connection.
“Our task is to enable our citizens to continue using the Internet in the event of aggressive actions. Root servers are located in the USA and Europe. If the root servers are turned off, you will not be able to access the site, even if the Internet is working,” Lugovoi said.
He recalled that in 2012, as a result of a special operation by the US National Security Agency, the Internet was turned off in Syria.
“This is not an exaggeration or a figure of speech. Traffic was not interrupted either within the country or outside. It’s just that a series of IP addresses disappeared from the routing tables, and traffic bypassed the country. Every single Syrian website has become inaccessible,” the politician noted.
According to him, Russia currently has virtually no control over its communication lines.
“We have no idea about them. And also about cross-border crossings. This is how the Internet developed in the 90s and 2000s,” added Lugovoi.
This thesis was supported by another deputy who came from the special services, Nikolai Ryzhak.
“Reveling in freedom in the 90s, we allowed FAPSI to form an entire set of tools based on a false software product. At that time we worked very closely with Siemens. It turned out that there were a lot of bookmarks. And they were forced to liquidate this department and give communications as a structural unit to the FSB,” Ryzhak said.
The Russian State Duma today passed in its first reading a bill on the creation of an independent infrastructure for the uninterrupted functioning of the Internet in Russia. This bill provides for the creation of an infrastructure that will ensure the operability of Russian Internet resources in the event of an inability to connect to foreign root servers.
The US completely controls the RuNet.