Try and Block Me
A Concise Chronology of Russian Federal Services’ Feud With Telegram
June 20th, 2018 by Alice Yastrebova
Three months have passed since Roskomnadzor, Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, commonly abbreviated as RKN, announced its receipt of the court order to ban Telegram Messenger, LLC, on Russian territory. At the height of its efforts, the watchdog blacklisted 20 million IP addresses, resulting in a slew of malfunctioning websites and apps — including other messengers like Viber and Skype, credit card terminals, and Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube and Google Maps. Telegram itself, ironically, has continued to work more or less stably, occasionally even accessible to Russian users without proxies or VPNs. Thus far, RKN has placed the onus on ISPs, denying liability for the “broken” services not expressly blacklisted. As of the date of this publication, the number of blacklisted IP addresses has simmered down to just under 3.8 million.
The service continues to work stably. Government structures like the Main Directorate for Migration Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remain active on Telegram. When asked about the ministry’s official channel in Telegram in a June 20th interview with Kommersant about diplomacy in the digital age, Maria Zakharova, Director of the Information and Press Department of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, replied: “I don’t see any сontradiction… We consulted with Roskomnadzor and got all the necessary explanations about this. The ban doesn’t extent to actually working in Telegram.”
Let’s take a look at some of the watershed moments in the war between Telegram and Russian federal services.
June 6, 2016: The so-called Yarovaya package, a set of federal bills 374-FZ and 375-FZ, is signed into law by president Vladimir Putin, amending previous legislation on counter-terrorism. The new laws mandate ISPs to store users’ Internet traffic for six months (beginning June 20, 2016) and TSPs to record phone conversations (beginning July 1, 2018). According to the authors of the bills, such measures are necessary to address issues of public safety and and counter-terrorism.
April 3, 2017: A suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg subway kills 16, including suspected bomber, and injures 51 others.
June 23: Aleksandr Zharov, head of Roskomnadzor, publishes an open letter to Telegram and its founder-CEO Pavel Durov, in which he rebukes the messenger’s administration for not responding to RKN’s demand for Telegram to officially register with the service. If Telegram did not comply, Zharov warned, it “must be blocked in Russia until we receive the necessary information.”
Later that day, Durov responds on his VK page with a critique of Zharov’s campaign against the messenger, expressing that Telegram’s stance on terrorism is far from neutral: “since just the beginning of this month, Telegram has blocked over 5 thousand public channels and groups associated with the propaganda of terrorism”. Durov also pointed to the statistics of blocked terrorism-related content, published daily on Telegram’s ISIS Watch channel.
The deputy head of Minkomsvyaz (Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications) Aleksey Volin, when asked which services could provide an alternative to Telegram, replied: “We don’t have [anything] indispensable”.
June 26: The FSB issues a statement revealing they have “conclusive evidence” as a result of the ongoing investigation that terrorists involved in the St. Petersburg subway attack used Telegram to coordinate the bombing. The 98-word statement also describes Telegram as “providing terrorists with the ability to create secret chats with a high level of encryption of the transmitted data”.
June 28: Durov agrees to provide Roskomnadzor with the information necessary to register Telegram with the federal service, emphasising that this data was already freely available. In the same statement, Durov insisted: “we will adhere neither to the unconstitutional and technically inexecutable “Yarovaya law”, nor other laws incompatible with the protection of private life and Telegram’s Privacy Policy”. The CEO promised also that the extent of Telegram’s cooperation with the Russian government will be the same as in every other country — specifically the deletion of terrorist propaganda, calls to violence, child pornography and spam.
October 16: The Meshchansky District court fines Telegram Messenger, LLC 800,000 rubles* for not providing the FSB with encryption keys that could be used to decode users’ correspondence.
Presidential press-secretary Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the ruling, saying: “there currently aren’t any kind of talks on blocking” the messenger.
* (Editor’s note: 800,000 rubles is the contemporary equivalent of 14,000 USD).
December 8: Telegram files an appeal against the FSB (Federal Security Service) with the Russian Supreme Court in an attempt to contest the ruling of the Meshchansky District court.
December 12: Yulia Mordvinova, the judge of Meshchansky court, upholds the previous ruling and refuses the motions of the Telegram legal team. During the proceedings, Telegram lawyers also disclose that the dispute between the FSB and the messenger resulted from the service’s request (back on June 14) for Telegram to make keys for decrypting messages sent by suspects in the case of the St. Petersburg subway bombing.
March 20, 2018: The Russian Supreme Court refuses Telegram’s motion against FSB. Following the court order, Roskomnadzor publishes their notification to Telegram, announcing that the messenger must hand over their encryption keys to the FSB within the court-mandated period of 15 days.
April 6: The fifteen-day period stipulated by the court expires. RKN promptly files a lawsuit demanding that Telegram be blocked on the territory of the Russian Federation.
April 13: Yulia Smolina, the Tagansky District court judge, rules to block Telegram Messenger, LLC in Russia, “effective immediately”.
Durov retorts with the claim that Telegram will use built-in methods of bypassing the block and duly inform users about the developments.
OSCE representative Harlem Désir characterises the decision as “deeply worrying” and implores Russian authorities to reconsider.
April 16–17: RKN launches an aggressive offensive against the messenger, ordering ISPs to block Amazon and Google networks and host sites it believes Telegram to be using in order to bypass the ban.
By the end of April 17, the number of blacklisted IP addresses surges to nearly 20 million.
In his English-language Telegram channel, Durov puts the number of Russian Telegram users at about 7 % of the messenger’s total user base. While admitting that losing those users would not impact the service significantly, the founder-CEO declares: “it is important for me personally to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users”.
Human rights group Agora opens a legal hotline for businesses affected by the massive IP address blocks. According to lawyer Damir Gainutdinov, as recounted to Meduza, over 60 companies, “[mainly] small businesses”, reached out to Agora for support.
In addition, Durov claims he will donate “millions of dollars this year” in bitcoin grants to support socks5 proxies and VPNs, and dubs the anti-censorship movement the “Digital Resistance”.
American whistleblower Edward Snowden expresses support for Telegram on his Twitter despite past critiques of the service’s security model.
April 18: Political activist Maria Alyokhina, best known as part of the Pussy Riot collective, organises a protest, tossing paper airplanes outside of FSB’s Moscow headquarters. 12 are detained. Alyokhina is sentenced to 100 hours of community service.
Around midnight, RKN blacklists nearly 130,000 IP addresses belonging to web hosting company DigitalOcean, the world’s 3rd largest provider, according to Netcraft.
April 19: Microsoft joins the list of companies whose IP addresses are blacklisted as part of RKN’s manic campaign against Telegram.
April 22: Durov calls upon Russian allies to fly paper airplanes (in salute to Telegram’s logo) to express their dissent and gives a name to the burgeoning movement — the “Digital Resistance.” (And here’s “Resistance Dog” and a spin-off, “Resistance Girl,” both Telegram sticker packs featuring the paper airplane logo and hooded figures).
April 27: RKN adds addresses belonging to Russian and American tech giants, including Yandex, VK, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Liveinternet, to the registry of blacklisted IPs. Two hours later, the addresses disappear, a glitch which the censor explained away by unspecified “technical quirks of the system”. ISPs didn’t begin implementing the blocks.
Mail.ru, Yandex, and VK, giants of Russian Internet industry, respond in the following ways: Mail.ru launches proxy servers to circumvent blocks; Yandex awaits explanation from RKN, calls the offensive against Telegram “a blow to the entire RuNet [Russian-language Internet]”; VK announces implementation of end-to-end encryption for audio and video calls.
April 28: RKN whitelists nearly 3 million of Amazon’s IP addresses, according to independent monitorings.
April 29: Durov starts a Russian-language Telegram channel; urges users to join the pro-Telegram demonstration organised by Russian Libertarian Party — to take place at 2pm on April 30 on Prospekt Sakharova, as approved by Moscow City Hall. According to Meduza, Telegram sends out official service notifications with information on the rally.
April 30: Meduza reported over 10.5 thousand attendees at the demonstration, Radio Svoboda cited a figure of 12 thousand.
July 1: The Yarovaya bill becomes law, requiring ISPs and TSPs to record and store users’ information for up to six months — in spite of the fact that its implementation is technically impossible, in the direct sense of the word.
