Logging on During an Invasion
Since the 1990s, the internet has increasingly played a crucial role in exposing war crimes, fact checking government statements, and providing valuable assistance to civilians fleeing conflict. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine highlights the importance of internet access as tool to promote transparency, protect the free press, and aid humanitarian efforts during conflict. However, aggressor states have consistently sought to cut off the internet and the free flow of information. One way to circumvent this is to move towards a more unconventional approach to internet access, relying less on ground-based internet service providers (ISPs) often under state-control in authoritarian countries to remote and portable receiver terminals linked to satellites. Elon Musk recently demonstrated this capability by providing SpaceX Starlink satellite internet terminals to Ukraine to circumvent disruptions and Russian efforts to control and censor information.
Internet as a transparency tool
Since the 1990s, the internet has shaped how the world sees armed conflict. In 2003, the world watched Operation Iraqi Freedom unfold on dialup or DSL internet connections, requiring the viewer to watch choppy, often lagging video feeds of troop movements in the Iraqi battlespace, albeit in real time. Once YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms arrived, the internet became a better tool for transparency during armed conflict around the world. A 2015 Vice News report on Russian forces geotagging themselves in Eastern Ukraine despite official Russian government denial is an example of such exposure. With the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, Twitter bloggers have been able to meticulously annotate Russian combat losses based off metadata and photographic evidence, effectively countering Russian propaganda that initially denied any casualties or battlefield losses.
Internet disruption, control, and censorship
The dissemination of information to the public has always been a component of military and political strategy during war, the internet significantly accelerated its importance. “Infowar” has now become embedded in modern military doctrine. Autocratic regimes and even democracies seek to control the flow of information in order to secure the hearts and minds at home and abroad. In Ukraine, reports have emerged that advancing Russian forces have deliberately disrupted internet and telecommunication access in an attempt to silence the Ukrainian narrative from being heard and to conceal Russian military war crimes.
In Russia’s case, the Kremlin has increasingly sought to control and stifle information related to its invasion that it views as subversive. Reports have indicated that the Russian government has banned certain unflattering terminology going so far as prohibiting domestic journalists from using the terms “invasion” and “assault” in media. Prior to the conflict, the Russian government imposed increasingly restrictive laws, called “landing laws” on international tech companies requiring them to maintain local offices with designated employees and making them subject to government intimidation, a tactic the Kremlin used to intimidate and murder Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax attorney hired by British-American investor Bill Browder. In 2021, the Russian government pressured Google and Apple to remove leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny’s tactical voting app from its app stores, allegedly through physical intimidation of local Google and Apple employees. In response, the move has prompted most Western tech companies to fully pullout or dramatically downsize their presence in the Russian market.
These moves are the hallmark of an autocratic regime seeking to control and censor the flow of information towards its own citizens. While China established its own sophisticated domestic intranet increasingly cut off from the free and open internet and “VPN proof” thanks to its “Great Firewall”, Russia has relied on fairly primitive and brutish methods to control information without relying on an all-encompassing technological censorship network. The Kremlin recently applied these methods by outright banning Facebook and Twitter domestically.
Solutions to circumvent autocratic control: satellite internet and encryption
Given these censorship efforts and disruptions, those seeking to log on during war can now look to other options besides terrestrial and fiber-optic cable-based networks, including satellite internet. While satellite internet has existed for a couple decades, it has a reputation for latency and interference issues, partly due to its reliance on geostationary satellites that only orbit around Earth’s equator, slowing connectivity. However the deployment of modern low orbit constellations of satellite, new systems have greatly improved internet connectivity speeds. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems hopes to launch a 12,000-strong constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. As of February, 2022, Starlink has launched around 2,000 satellites, setting up an impressive constellation network. Satellite internet receivers have also greatly improved in terms of their portability and price, costing around $500 per terminal. All these factors made Starlink an ideal system to ensure internet connectivity on the ever-changing battlefield in Ukraine.
In addition to internet connectivity, secure encrypted communication remains critical for civil society in both Ukraine and Russia to endure the Russian military invasion. End-to-end encryption messaging apps have allowed average citizens in Russia and Ukraine to communicate and disseminate news without disruption, government interference, or monitoring during a period of intense geopolitical turmoil. Apps like WhatsApp and Signal have in fact witnessed a spike in usage due to their end-to-end encryption protections, allowing Ukrainian State Emergency Services, paramedics, NGOs, or other entities for example, to communicate without fear of the Russian government surveillance. They have also allowed Russian citizens to circumvent propagandizing state-sponsored news outlets. One of the most popular messaging/forum apps in the region, Telegram, has faced more scrutiny from Ukrainian users due to the absence of end-to-end encryption on the platform, with some fearing that the popular app would open its doors to Kremlin control.
Internet access has become a vital tool to open the curtains on modern warfare. For that reason, governments will always seek to control narratives online, or in the case of autocratic regimes, censor and silence dissent. With the arrival of cheap, viable, and high-speed satellite internet, as well as end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, civilian internet users can use those tools to preserve their fundamental privacy rights and survive during an armed conflict, using technology to promote their fight for freedom against the onslaught of authoritarian violence.
By Nicholas Rodman, Program Officer at Stand Together Trust
