Getting online in Russia – which tech companies are standing up to Putin?

Getting online in Russia – which tech companies are standing up to Putin?
The Mozilla Foundation, widely recognised for the Firefox Browser, temporarily took down browser add-ons that assist people in Russia in bypassing state censorship, following a request from the state, according to news reports. It reversed this decision and reinstated the browser add-ons that Russia objected to. Apple though has been criticised by a VPN provider for complying with Russian demands to remove its tool from Apple’s Russian app store. Freelance technology researcher and journalist Samuel Woodhams is on SOEP to tell us what’s been happening and who is standing up to Putin.

First academic evidence of online harassment of women in India
Dealing with trolls requires solidarity, according to a well-known Indian journalist and academic, Dr. Sanjukta Basu, who has personally experienced vicious trolling. She’s been in the UK presenting her research which documents the online abuse women in India have experienced on Twitter/X. We discuss her research on how women can combat toxicity online, particularly in response to orchestrated attacks by right-wing nationalists in India.   

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.  

More on this week's stories:
Firefox browser blocks anti-censorship add-ons at Russia’s request
Devs claim Apple is banning VPNs in Russia 'more effectively' than Putin
Dr. Sanjukta Basu

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello everyone, I'm Gareth. Welcome along to Somewhere on Earth. It is Tuesday the 30th of July 2024. We're in London with voices from well, London. Also Delhi. But the person was in London. Anyway. You'll pick it up as you go along. Here we are. 

00:00:23 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us today in London, let's mention that again is Peter Guest, journalist and all round, good chap. There we are. Right. So Pete, how are you? Ok? 

00:00:32 Peter Guest 

 Yeah, not too bad Gareth. How are you? 

00:00:33 Gareth Mitchell 

 Yep, alright, thank you. I’ve just trying to get my head around this whole business of the CrowdStrike incident. You know, that huge outage on July the 19th when a lot of the infrastructure just switched off. 

00:00:46 Peter Guest 

Yeah. Why worry about cyber security when a cyber security company can just take that a chunk of the Internet in one go. 

00:00:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Didn't go well, but the the kind of news-ish peg for talking about it now is that Microsoft has just put out a little kind of report about what it's learned and what happened. So in my best possible way of trying to explain this really briefly. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

What had happened was that this was an issue at so-called kernel level. So in other words, right at the very heart of the Windows operating system. And Pete, I'm very simplistic. And by the way, dear listener, if I'm talking rubbish here, deep right in, but my way that I've made myself understand this is if you imagine an operating system as being like a really high secure building  

00:01:28 Gareth Mitchell 

it's a bit like, kernel level is the control centre right at the very heart of that building that controls everything. The air con, the lights, the doors, you name it. The one part of the building that you really can't have going wrong. And it was the Microsoft Windows equivalent of that where this issue was, which obviously gives an idea of how it became so serious. 

00:01:48 Gareth Mitchell 

And the whole thing, of course, has raised questions about whether the third party organisations, in this case the company CrowdStrike, should have access to such a fundamental part of such a ubiquitous operating system. 

00:02:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Microsoft has come up with a few interim lessons that they've learned, like, for instance, improving the safety of security updates. I could probably have told them that to be honest, but there is a bit more detail there to be fair to them, and it's just interesting to see this sort of interim conclusion from what was a pretty disastrous day for Microsoft, and that company CrowdStrike. 

00:02:20 Gareth Mitchell 

But just briefly, Pete, you're a bit of a you're an infrastructure fan, aren't you? How was it for you darling? 

00:02:25 Peter Guest 

I love a bit of infrastructure. 

00:02:28 Peter Guest 

I mean, you take your metaphor a little bit further. I mean, it's a high security building where it was kind of put together by volunteers, a couple of companies built the back door, maybe the foundations were laid by some scientists in the 1970s and and that's the thing with the Internet, right? We've talked about this before that it's sort of a public good that's run on this cobbled together infrastructure, some of it's private, some of it's public, some of it's robust, some of it just falls off. 

00:02:51 Gareth Mitchell 

As we saw the other day on Friday, July the 19th. All right, let's jump in. 

00:03:02 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today.  Russian censorship and VPN providers, that's what we're talking about in the first half. Russia's been ordering browser developers to remove anti censorship add-ons and also tech companies to remove certain VPNs from their app stores. 

00:03:22 Gareth Mitchell 

But isn't complying just the reality of doing business in Russia or is it just putting profits before principle and giving in to state surveillance. Also today, how women can take back the Internet from the trolls? It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:42 Gareth Mitchell 

So the Mozilla Foundation, best known for the Firefox browser, has been in the news. At the behest of Russia it's temporarily removed browser add-ons that help people in Russia evade state censorship. One activist quoted in an article by the investigative journalism site The Intercept wasn't happy,  

00:04:00 Gareth Mitchell 

calling this a rash decision from the Mozilla Foundation. But a few weeks later, the mighty El Reg. Yes, The Register Tech News website, said Mozilla had actually shown guts having reversed the ban, reinstating the browser add-ons that Russia didn't like. 

00:04:17 Gareth Mitchell 

And that really is more than can be said for Apple. Now it angered one VPN provider for complying with Russian demands for its tool to be taken down from Apple’s Russian app store. So let's talk VPN's, Russian censorship and the tech companies with none other than Samuel Woodhams, who's a freelance researcher and is here in the studio.  Hello, Samuel.  

00:04: Samuel Woodhams 

Hi Gareth. Thanks for having me. 

00:04:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Always good to see you as well. Now, first of all, you can critique my summary of what went on. This is, I know there's quite a lot to unpack here. You know, VPN's were ordered to be taken down. Mozilla got itself into a little bit of hot water by complying with Russia. But, and it seems to have gone back on it. There's quite a lot to unpack here. So for the confused listener, let's just start with the Mozilla Foundation. So the the people behind Firefox. What happened then? What? What did Russia or its agency anyway? This Roskomnadzor  agency within the Russian authority? What did it tell Mozilla Foundation to do? 

00:05:15 Samuel Woodhams 

Yeah. So Roskomnadzor, like you say, is Russia's kind of Internet censorship agency. And over the last, at least kind of three or four years now, they've been going after VPN providers to basically prevent people in Russia from using these apps, primarily because of the kind of increased blocking of online resources that Russia have been conducting over the last few years. And then particularly since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. 

00:05:40 Samuel Woodhams 

Um, and what we've seen is really a kind of multi-pronged attack on VPN's from from Russia, one of which is going after browser developers like Mozilla and asking for certain add-ons which are a bit like Chrome extensions to be removed. They've also been going after operating system developers. So Apple to take down, I think the full number was 25 apps, 25 VPNs that Apple complied with and removed from their App Store. And all of this is having a a pretty detrimental impact on people in Russia trying to access news and lots of other information that is currently being restricted. 

00:06:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Because you mentioned Apple there and there is a VPN on its App Store, the Red Shield VPN. I think that was taken down. 

00:06:23 Samuel Woodhams 

Yeah, so it seems in this kind of round of of targeted attacks, they are looking at apps that are specifically designed to operate in Russia. And particularly those that are being used pretty widespreadly in the country, but there's lots of other big names that have also been affected and this really is only just one way that they are also being targeted. 

00:06:41 Samuel Woodhams 

We saw earlier in the year, Russia started actually disrupting the protocols that enable all VPNs to to operate. The problem with that is that even what Russia would consider legitimate use of VPN, so businesses using them for, for, for people working remotely, they were disrupted too. 

00:07:01 Gareth Mitchell 

And and, dear listener, sorry for being a bit back to front here. Perhaps we should just explain, just in case people are wondering what VPN's are. I bet you, well, you you you're gonna have, like a media friendly definition, if anyone does, Samuel. So what is a VPN? 

00:07:15 Samuel Woodhams 

So in its simplest terms, it reroutes your Internet connection to a different server before going on to our website, and often that server can be in a different country, essentially meaning that your Internet traffic looks as if it's originating from a different country.  So if you're in Russia, where the New York Times is banned, you can access a server that is based in Germany, where it's not, and therefore access the New York Times. 

00:07:38 Gareth Mitchell 

And that thing you were saying with protocols then. So these were, the certain technical protocols on the Internet that VPN's use in order to create that cloaking effect, if you like, to make it look as if you're in a different country to where you actually are. 

00:07:53 Samuel Woodhams 

Yeah, exactly. They're they're essentially the kind of under underlying rules that enable essentially all of them to operate. And there's a number of different protocols, but it's what enables them to work. 

00:08:02 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Alright. So, Peter, what do you make of all this? So I know just in your work in investigative journalism, you'll be using a lot of these kinds of tools. You can tell me now about how much you have or haven't operated in Russia? I know you've worked in a lot of former Soviet Union states, let's put it that way. So what do you make of all this? 

00:08:21 Peter Guest 

I mean look, I think the first thing to say here is that, I mean you just explained what a VPN is and this can often feel really abstract. All of surveillance and censorship can feel really abstract, particularly to those of us living in the west, right? But you have to give the context as to what happens in in the dark, I guess you'd say. 

00:08:46 Peter Guest 

Russia under Putin is a place where control of information is used as a weapon, so shutting off that information from the outside world by stopping people using their VPN and stopping them seeing the New York Times, or any other media source is actually about creating a vacuum that you then fill yourself with your own narratives. And those narratives are pretty horrendous, you know, this is what allows you to create an environment where all of your opponents are traitors. They're terrorists, where you demonize foreigners, you demonize religious minorities, you demonize LGBTQ people, which is happening in Russia right now, and they're being exposed to violence as a result of it. So information control feels really abstract, but it actually has really very serious real world consequences. 

00:09:26 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I mean that's, in a few minutes we’re going to hear from a digital activist and academic in India who certainly knows all about that. You know what happens when you bump up against the state or certainly people who don't like you very much, you put a human aspect onto these stories and you realise, yeah, that this is far from abstract for so many people. 

00:09:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Samuel, what about the what happened with the Mozilla Foundation? Because I picked up on this story because I read this piece in the excellent Intercept investigative news on the excellent Intercept investigative news website. And it was a headline really saying that this is the Mozilla Foundation kind of giving into caving into Russian demands. 

00:10:05 Gareth Mitchell 

And I was thinking this isn't the Mozilla Foundation that I that I've known for a long time. In fact, I use the Firefox browser and I know that they really care about some digital rights online, for instance. So it does seem as if they went back on this then. So in the end they reinstated these add-ons. But, I mean, it's, and they're not here to talk about this themselves. So I'm just being a little bit careful here, but what do you make of the Mozilla Foundation itself being drawn into this? 

00:10:33 Samuel Woodhams 

Yeah, I think it's a, it's a difficult one. On the one hand, you know it's it's good that that these apps have been reinstated. These add-ons are are now accessible again. It's not ideal that they were taken down in the first place. But I think what it goes to show is the kind of the complex responsibilities that these sorts of companies have in countries like Russia. 

00:10:55 Samuel Woodhams 

They are at risk if they don't comply with a number of kind of legal and potentially kind of financial impacts, but ultimately they also have an ethical duty to maintain these tools and to allow people in Russia to access this information. So it's a really difficult one, but obviously positive that they have been reinstated. 

00:11:14 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, absolutely. And we did actually ask Mozilla Foundation for a comment. We haven't heard back from them, but of course, they're not here to give their side of the story. But you know, but I think you've made a very good point there, Samuel, about the fine line that they and so many other tech organizations have to tread here. Maybe a final few words from you on this, Pete, if you have anything burning? 

00:11:34 

I'm not sure I can say it much, much better than Simon did there. I think it's never going to be black and white, but you have to make a decision as as the company, you know, do you continue to offer the tools. Or do you offer a bastardised form of your products? Because at least that way you know you're offering those tools or does that make you complicit? And there's gonna be different degrees of complicity. 

00:11:54 Gareth Mitchell 

And are you doing more harm by just walking away rather than just complying a little bit or making it look as if you're complying it? Yeah it's complicated. 

00:12:01 Peter Guest 

And you know the thin end of the wedge argument is always a challenging one. But but where do you start complying? Where do you stop? 

00:12:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, this is it. Alright. Thank you very much folks. Now the starting point for women when it comes to dealing with trolls is solidarity. So says a well known Indian journalist and academic. Dr Sanjukta Basu has been viciously trolled herself. A horrid experience, of course, and one that led Sanjukta to study online trolling in her PhD thesis. 

00:12:31 Gareth Mitchell 

She's been in the UK recently, taking part in a number of conferences, so it's been a great chance to catch up with Sanjukta in person. In fact, I first met her way back in 2006 when I was with the BBC interviewing the infamous Delhi bloggers, and they were a group of suitably Webby and very lovely people who are blogging right back in those really early days. 

00:12:51 Gareth Mitchell 

So back to its Sanjukta's research on trolls then, and how women can fight back against toxicity online, especially in the face of some pretty nasty orchestrated stuff spewed out by right wing nationalists in India. First, Sanjukta and I talked about online safe spaces for women. 

00:13:11 Sanjukta Basu 

Online safe spaces for women just means that they should have the right to be able to express themselves. Whether that is about a political expression or even their everyday existential quest on and, and this goes back to my own life, my own experiences on the Internet. I started blogging in the year 2005 when blog was a very new thing in India and across the world  

00:13:36 Sanjukta Basu 

and I realized that until that moment when I started blogging, just as a fluke incident, but that gave me a whole new turn of life. It was like my second birth. I believe that it's like philosopher Hannah Arendt says that human beings are born equal. But also with specific humanity. But that specific humanity is only acquired when we place ourselves into the public sphere with our words and our deeds. 

00:14:01 Sanjukta Basu 

Not out of some utility or need, but just as a voluntary action. And I believe that women traditionally have not been able to place themselves in the public sphere either with their political views or their real life stories, lived experiences, because traditionally they've been told to live in the private sphere. But Internet gives women that kind of a hybrid space, which is both public yet private, it is both personalized yet detached. 

00:14:28 Sanjukta Basu 

Here women can, and as I have, can actually express themselves and raise a political consciousness, a feminist consciousness and a whole new outlook of their life. That, but that space, yeah. 

00:14:42 Gareth Mitchell 

So. So it's, and that's the upside. But as you've seen to your own cost really that there's the trolling aspect as well, making it very difficult. 

00:14:50 Sanjukta Basu 

Yeah, and and that's exactly where my research comes in, because I saw the initial phase of Internet which gave me this empowering space. But I also 2016 onwards, started noticing and started  

00:15:04 Sanjukta Basu 

facing trolling myself a lot as we saw a rise of Hindu nationalist government in India, a right wing in the nationalist ethno religious party in India. I started facing a trolling a lot and I then, it occurred to me that the same space which was so empowering suddenly got very hostile, suddenly got very threatened. It seemed like I can no longer use my space for my political expression, or even my day-to-day expressions. So you know that turned unsafe. 

00:15:33 Sanjukta Basu 

And it all come, then my study, my research revolves around this question. It began with my own experiences. But then I also interviewed 15 Indian women who have also faced trolling, as I have.  The point of the of the study is to gather these experiences to gather these evidences how women have been using the space of the Internet, the public sphere of the digital public sphere of the Twitter for their political expression, and then how that gets attacked, how that gets chipped away bit by bit, actually by trolling, harassment, abusive hate speech, lies, you know, those kinds of 

00:16:14 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And we've seen so much of the online space become increasingly toxic across many platforms, and of course, Twitter’s X has had a bad rap for this. I wonder if the situation online in India has been amplified by the political events going on in India, you know, and the flourishing, I suppose, of Hindu nationalism that we've seen over the last decade or so? 

00:16:34 Sanjukta Basu 

Yeah, yeah. Indian online space is very much influenced by the rise of the right wing nationalist party because they have the first players advantage on the Internet amongst all the political parties in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent the RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.  

00:16:55 Sanjukta Basu 

They are the first movers on Internet. They started using Internet way back in the 90s because they felt that the traditional media, the legacy media did not give them enough ample space to represent their voices, which I would say, in my opinion, rightly gate-keeped 

00:17:15 Sanjukta Basu 

because legacy media gate keeps certain kind of hateful narratives, you know, like anti Muslim narratives or anti immigrant narratives, hate speech. So you couldn't publish them on the television or the newspapers, you know, traditionally. But Internet then became a space for these 

00:17:33 Sanjukta Basu 

right wing Hindu nationalist counter public to use this space to run with their agendas and their propagandas. So therefore now today we have the largest army of right wing nationalist trolls on the Internet. And when I say trolls, I don't mean it to be a derogatory word, I mean to say 

00:17:52 Sanjukta Basu 

that there are accounts which are right wing pro BJP, pro RSS or Hindu nationalist account, but it's very difficult to know whether they are real account or their votes. Is one person running many accounts or are these really so many accounts? So yeah. 

00:18:08 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. But but what we do know is it's making it a very unpleasant and indeed unsafe online space for women. So, gosh, I mean, this is very deep research that you're doing. Probably no easy answers, but are you finding your way through to some kind of solutions, may be safe spaces for women online if that kind of thing is possible? 

00:18:28 Sanjukta Basu 

There is no answer. My research sort of documents this arc of Internet being a very empowering, positive space to getting, becoming hostile due to the rise of nationalism and hate speech and fake news. 

00:18:42 Sanjukta Basu 

The post truth world that we now live in, where we have actually lost morality, standards, ethics, which is why women are constantly targeted and having documented, having collected evidence from other, my research participants, how they are losing that space,  what does it mean to hold on to that space on on Twitter?  I have reached a point where I know that yes, we are losing that space, but how do we reclaim that space? How do we make the space safer?  

00:19:09 Sanjukta Basu 

There's no easy right answer to it, but I think just like in the physical space also, women have always traditionally faced it, find it difficult to go out in the street or in the park, and if they get into trouble, they would be asked or what, why was she in the park at late at night? Why was she wearing that kind of dress? So similarly on the Internet also we are now  

00:19:30 Sanjukta Basu 

asked why do you go to Twitter and make your political opinions, but the only way we both in the public, in the digital public sphere as well as the physical public sphere, the only way we make it safer is by reclaiming it. So not give up our fight and what I see really is that there is a, there is a fight. We see that there is a constant clash  

00:19:49 Sanjukta Basu 

between the trolls and it's not just the trolls. I have also been targeted by the mainstream media. I have been targeted by the government and not just me, but a group of us. We are not just dealing with the trolls, but we're dealing with the whole systemic, authoritative regime which wants to impose one kind of ideology. 

00:20:10 Sanjukta Basu 

And whoever diverts from that ideology are being, you know, trolled and harassed in various ways. But the only way we make it safer is by holding on to it. One of the things that I found out in my study is that when we stand up for each other, that's 

00:20:23 Sanjukta Basu 

what really empowers us and make us feel safer, and also the trolls also get very baffled when they, suppose one of them is coming to my timeline and abusing me. But another woman then comes to my timeline and stands up against this troll. That's when the trolls also gets very baffled. Like they don't know what to do with this.  

00:20:43 Sanjukta Basu 

And I, as someone who was the victim of this abuse also feel this empowerment that you know somebody stood up for me and over and I spoke to all of my research participants,  they all said that here is the best way to deal with this is not  

00:20:56 Sanjukta Basu 

by blocking, not by muting, not by calling the cops or tagging it to Twitter. But the best way is when we are standing up for each other and showing solidarity. And yet I would put a disclaimer over here. Yet it is difficult to get there because we also have our internal differences, political differences, we have our you know, various kinds of  

00:21:18 Sanjukta Basu 

mental space to deal with these trolls. Is it possible for us to go to somebody's timeline and then fight with the trolls to show solidarity? It's not easy. It's not difficult. There we have a sense of competitive victimhood that that breeds in us. So it's all very messy. 

00:21:38 Gareth Mitchell 

It certainly is. That’s Sanjukta Basu, speaking to me a few days ago in London.  The three guys sitting here in the studio, far be it for us to want to sit here and mansplain online safety to women. So we're not even going to go there obviously. But Pete Guest, what did you make of what you just heard? 

00:21:56 Peter Guest 

Well, I mean, we should address the point, the three guys sitting in a room because, I mean historically, I think that is the composition of, or the demographic of the people who made policy at social media platforms, right. And there's a, there's a very credible argument that the lack of representation within tech companies is what's led us to a place where this kind of thing is, is systemic and. And it is it's structural, right? We've been talking about this for, you know, nearly twenty years. 

00:22:20 Peter Guest 

It's structural, right? We know the algorithms that govern what is surfaced on platforms are engineered to maximize engagement. What maximizes engagement is amplifying division and anger. And with that comes hate speech and and dehumanization. And I think, you know, it's very encouraging to see, you know, the the idea of solidarity as a mechanism against this. But there is another mechanism against this which is fix the algorithms. 

00:22:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Yeah. And fix those algorithms by having more diverse people in the room when those algorithms are being fixed. 

00:22:49 Peter Guest 

Right, and I think you know we just talked about censorship, right. And I'm aware that there is this very reductive argument that runs, what you deprioritize people to expand these ideologies and that's a form of censorship. But the information space is just so toxic. And it's been so poisoned that this isn't a public square. It's a hostile space where one party's been given a bullhorn. 

00:23:09 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And it was kind of almost heartbreaking really, well it was to hear Sanjukta saying that women have to reclaim the online space again. I mean, it's crazy for any group of people, indeed any individual, to feel that they're not welcome. And the idea that, you know, even if there is a way of if Sanjukta said right, this is the way that we can reclaim the space, even to be having that conversation that I found and did find during that interview profoundly depressing. 

00:23:34 Gareth Mitchell 

After all, look, you know where we're meant to be, you know mid well, you know, 2024.  Samuel Woodhams. I know you've come on here to talk about other things, but you were listening to that. I could see you're very engaged with what Sanjukta was saying. 

00:23:46 Samuel Woodhams 

Yeah, I think it's a really powerful message actually. And there's obviously such a significant issue globally. Obviously here in the UK there's been a lot of discussion around the online safety bill, trying to tackle these exact kind of problems, and and I also think the the kind of issue around anonymity is a, is 

00:24:06 Samuel Woodhams 

really difficult and an important one because on the one hand, anonymity online has  enabled toxicity for sure, but it can also provide a kind of a safety net for people that otherwise may be persecuted in the real world. And I think finding the balance around anonymity online and making sure that there, it is responsibly used and the platforms are able to protect their users, is really, really significant. 

00:24:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. And and the space, my own two penn’orth, and listening to that and during the interview and you know, Sanjukta was talking about how some people might say, well, you know, for women it's it's very easy or you know for any group that gets a hard time online if you don't want to be trolled, well the best thing to do is not be there in the first place or just switch off your comments, which is a ridiculous thing to say to any human being in the first place. 

00:24:52 Gareth Mitchell 

But it's it's a bit like these people who say to women, well, you know the best thing to do is when you're out like late at night, if you, you know do that thing where you've got your key between your you know two knuckles for instance just in case anything happens and make sure you stay in this area it says no hang on men do you mind just not making women feel like that in the first place you know. 

00:25:13 Gareth Mitchell 

that would be quite nice, and the online equivalents apply. So. So there we are. I think we can leave it there, but thank you very much indeed to you, Pete Guest, you're back again next week. Yes.  

00:25:26 Peter Guest 

Thanks, Gareth. See you then. 

00:25:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Always nice to see you as well, Samuel. And more of course, from both these guys in the subscription version of this podcast and yeah, look, I get it, folks, if you don't subscribe, I know it's annoying to have that FOMO of ohh that you know, that's all for the subscription. It's not on, but somehow we need to keep the lights on around here. So the subscription it is, so I'm just going to give that a little plug if you don't mind, just really quickly, it's ten U.S. dollars a month and if you don't like it, you can cancel that subscription any time, 

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00:26:44 Gareth Mitchell 

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00:27:34 Gareth Mitchell 

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00:27:54 Gareth Mitchell 

And audio this week has been by Keziah Wenham Kenyon here at Lansons Team Farner and the production manager is Liz Tuohy, the editor and producer, is Ania Lichtarowicz. And I'm Gareth. Thanks for listening. Bye, bye.