Why are protesters in Russia flying paper planes?
Imagine the US Federal Government trying to block a popular messaging app - say, Facebook Messenger.
Now, imagine Mark Zuckerberg fighting back,
and the government then imposing a blanket ban on a huge portion of the Internet in retaliation.
That’s what’s happening in Russia right now.
In recent weeks, Russian officials have been doing everything within their power to ban Telegram,
a popular messaging app used by 13 million Russians.
In their haste to shut the app down,
the Russian equivalent of the FCC, blocked 20 million IP addresses,
crippling the Russian internet.
They then scaled that back to a mere ballpark 14 million.
The IP address ban and targeting of Telegram has led to mass protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg,
where people used paper planes as a symbol of protest, since it’s the logo of the app.
But let’s rewind a bit:
what is Telegram,
and why does the Russian government seem so eager to block it?
Telegram is a messaging app that promises privacy and protection for users against surveillance by governments,
or other parties.
They do this using encryption.
The app was co-founded by Pavel Durov, who’s often called Russia’s ‘Mark Zuckerberg,’
and his brother Nikolai.
They released it in 2013,
in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance in the United States.
Before Telegram, Pavel Durov was already a well-known Internet entrepreneur:
he also founded the Russian social network VKontakte, which translates to “in contact”.
In a move that Zuckerberg would likely respect, Durov, his brother and their team designed it to look a lot like Facebook.
VK launched in 2006, two years after Facebook,
and became wildly popular in Russia very quickly.
They now claim to have over 460 million active users worldwide,
and they are the most popular social media website in Russia.
This attracted the attention of the Russian Government.
In 2011, they sent Durov a formal request to block political opposition accounts on the platform.
Durov refused to comply. Instead he tweeted, and posted on his VK page,
this cheeky image of a dog in a hoodie with his tongue hanging out, as his official response.
Presumably to persuade Durov further, a SWAT team was dispatched to his front door.
When he wouldn’t answer the door, the SWAT team retreated,
but the meddling from the Russian government didn’t stop there.
They continued to increase pressure against Durov, and over the next 2 years,
a fight unfolded over control of VK.
Shares of the company were bought and sold,
and Durov eventually sold his own controlling stake in the company.
By April of 2014, Durov announced his resignation from the company via his profile page
and decided to leave Russia rather than face more harassment from authorities.
He now has citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis,
an island country in the West Indies, and he travels the world.
Durov told the New York Times that it was during the infamous 2011 SWAT raid
that he realized he had no secure means of communicating with his brother.
And “That’s how Telegram started.”
After Snowden leaked the documents showing
how widespread and coordinated surveillance was among government agencies
and telecoms in the US, Telegram’s user base exploded -
and continued to explode with the news that Facebook had acquired rival messenger WhatsApp.
In an interview with Techcrunch in 2014, Durov said quote,
So, for many years now, Durov and the Russian government have had quite the adversarial relationship.
This partially explains why they’re selectively going after Telegram
and its relatively small base of 200 million monthly active users when competing apps
like WhatsApp have over 1.5 billion monthly active users.
Also, in 2016, Russia passed stringent anti-terrorism laws that have broad definitions,
that allows them to crack down on social media and the internet.
They have since used those laws to drag Telegram into a legal fight.
The KGB successor, Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB,
claimed in court they needed the ability to access all data on the platform
to defend the nation against terrorist attacks.
In practice, they want the ability to read users’ encrypted messages on telegram -
and they got a Russian court to approve it in a short hearing that lasted all of 18 minutes.
There has been a fair bit of controversy over reports that ISIS uses Telegram to communicate.
Durov has shut down public ISIS channels in the past
but said he would not mess with the privacy settings or hand any encryption keys over to governments.
So that Russian equivalent of the FCC I mentioned, earlier, ‘Roskomnadzor’
attempted to shut down all of the redundant IP addresses that provide access to the Telegram app.
So far this effort has shut down a lot of the Russian internet,
but it has NOT achieved its goal of shutting down Telegram.
Fast forward to: paper planes.
Recently, I spoke with Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev
to break down the implications of what’s happening for us….
he’s the managing editor of Russian news site codaru.com
One ironic thing he mentioned is that Russian government officials use Telegram.
He talked about why that happens and explains why they’re trying to ban it anyway.
Anyone who’s anyone in Russia has a Telegram account…
Which is why this ban was so hypocritical in the first place.
The government is trying to ban Telegram but has instituted a blanket ban on many many websites,
including Coda Story and even some of their own.
Alexey tells us about the reaction to that, inside Russia.
it would be fair to say that (the russian fcc) is the least popular agency in russia right now…
It’s a disaster.
A very rough estimate, the loss of revenue over this 3 weeks is about 1 billion bucks….
So that’s a lot.
They managed to take their own website offline.
So it’s safe to say that they botched the whole thing completely.
I also asked Alexey what Durov's reputation is like among the Russian public, since he hasn’t lived there in a number of years.
Everyone who uses VK or Telegram millions of people, to them Durov is a hero.
The Russia state television, propaganda, has been portraying him as someone who is aiding and abetting terrorism.
And he talked to us about what he thinks is going to happen next
and what we should be paying attention to.
Some people are celebrating this as a major victory...In its incompetence.
But I’ve spoken to a few people and they are not quite as optomistic…
That’s how Russian gov’t works.
It never forgets anything and it never forgives.
So it remains to be seen who will win in the fight between Telegram and the Russian Government.
The biggest obstacle may not actually be Durov,
but the Russian people,
a good portion of whom seem wholly unwilling to sacrifice their privacy.
Should private companies hand over user information when governments request it?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
And for more episodes of The Russia Desk, check out this playlist.