Khinshtein announced the threat of the emergence of information weapons of mass destruction: will VPNs be banned?

On March 1, a ban on the popularization of VPN services came into force in Russia. Now applications that allow you to bypass blocks set by Roskomnadzor cannot be advertised. You cannot display them in search results in the browser either. However, you can still use a VPN. That is, the state’s message is this: you can remain anonymous on the Internet if you want, but we won’t tell you where the masks are that will hide your true face.

Will the new restrictions be somewhat large-scale? Will the Russians be blocked from all the wormholes through which it is still possible to infiltrate the sites of foreign agent media and extremist social networks?

There is no talk of a complete ban on VPN services in Russia, assured the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, Alexander Khinshtein. However, with the arrival of spring, freedom on the Internet, of course, has become less.

A day after the ban on popularizing VPNs was introduced, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma IT Committee Anton Gorelkin casually mentioned that now Wikipedia could well be banned. From a legal point of view, nothing stands in the way. Now it is a matter of political will and expediency.

However, the state does not see the expediency of a complete ban on VPN services themselves. At least for now. That is why there is no political will for such a ban.

— We are talking about prohibiting any release of information that allows you to gain access and a link to any VPN. This also applies to search results,” Khinshtein explained the details of the new ban.

The restriction will not affect ordinary users in any way, the parliamentarian is sure. The head of the IT committee emphasized: downloading a VPN, as well as logging into the World Wide Web with its help, is not an offense, much less a crime. A citizen has the right to decide for himself what to put on his smartphone or computer and which doors of the virtual space to open. You can open it wide open without looking through the keyhole. It would only be good if dashing Internet revelers were aware of what they are risking by receiving the key to all doors in the form of yet another VPN service.

At the very least, they risk their personal data. Whether to pay such a high price for curiosity or not is up to each gadget owner to decide.

“It is important that every user understands the risks they face when using VPN services,” emphasized Alexander Khinshtein. – VPN is a router bypass. This is some kind of attempt to anonymize yourself on the Internet, to get a signal through other countries. It’s like you completely trust yourself to someone who tells you: “We will put you in a container and take you out of this embassy.” But you must understand that while you are being taken from the embassy in a container, everything that is in your pockets will be checked and examined. And then there is the question of responsibility and honesty of those who are carrying you.

How does this work in the virtual world? Once we connect to a VPN, we are essentially getting into a taxi or boarding a plane. That’s it, from now on we ourselves no longer control anything. We trust what the traffic provides to access all the information on our device.

– This may not entail any consequences, someone is lucky. Or it could lead to completely different consequences, and people should be aware of these risks,” Khinshtein noted.

Cybersecurity expert Andrei Masalovich believes that in addition to transferring control over his personal data to God knows who, the user of VPN services also risks… his head.

– You will actually have your head irradiated if you watch something that is prohibited. Since this content was banned, it means there was a reason to ban it. This could be fraud, it could be direct disinformation, it could be an attempt at some kind of psychological influence. “We must take care of our heads,” the expert urged.

As for the risks to personal data, the range of possibilities, according to information security experts, can be anything. Information about a citizen may be leaked to the nearest chain of grocery supermarkets or to a newfangled brand of expensive sneakers. It’s not so bad. Or maybe to the Ukrainian TsIPsO or the notorious American NSA, whose schemes for total surveillance of people were made public by Edward Snowden. This is already a problem.

The only good news is that the conventional sneaker brand needs ordinary Internet users much more than CIA spies.

— By connecting to the Internet through a proxy server, we trust information about ourselves to platforms that have much more data than the CIA and NSA. Global players are now collecting bases that the intelligence services have never dreamed of, says Andrei Masalovich. — The most expensive product on the IT market is ourselves, our profile.

More precisely, it’s not even ourselves that are interesting, but our behavior on the Internet and beyond. Having received data about us, those same global players – large retail chains, manufacturers of anything – begin to integrate us into the space of contextual advertising. It becomes clear to them who should be given an advertisement for diapers, who should be given an advertisement of beer, and who should be given both. Corporations are willing to pay (and do) a lot of money for this information; for this, data about people is collected.

Well, the most obvious risk is that by downloading something from an incomprehensible link, you can catch a virus. The same “Trojan horse” will easily steal all your data about bank cards and passwords from your phone, and you will, as usual: “I pressed something and everything disappeared.”

But there are also benefits from VPN services.

— The VPN itself sees you: all your actions, intentions, the contents of your computer, the settings of the systems that you are used to using. I have seen one positive result from this. There are several examples in the world where changing contextual advertising allowed parents to see that their daughter was actually pregnant. This is probably a plus. “Everything else is a minus,” says Andrei Masalovich.

It would be much easier to deal with VPN according to the logic of the natives from the “island of bad luck”: take it and cancel it, like Mondays.

But there is no such plan. At least for now. This means that it will not be possible to avoid collecting personal data of Russians, which then becomes what is called “big data”. If only because business is against such a decision. Russian business as well.

“We have been having a long discussion with business about whether big data should be available,” said Alexander Khinshtein. — Our (state. — “MK”) principled position is that big data that is transferred to anyone should only be anonymized.

The head of the State Duma IT Committee explained why there is such a struggle for the personal data of Russians. This is really important for business, and here’s why.

— The retail network gets access to your data, your content, it analyzes and understands your preferences, your requests, understands your locations, where you are coming from, where you live, what are the main points and understands which stores are on this route. “Understands the size of your average check, your financial condition, because most likely you have a credit card connected to your phone and it is possible to view your balance,” Khinshtein explained.

This is the model of global surveillance. Let it not be for the sake of spying, but for the sake of selling. Does this make it easier? Hardly. On the contrary, it becomes somehow sad. The spies got smaller.

Although in the era of hybrid wars, the danger of leaking personal data, which, according to experts, can fall into the wrong hands due to the use of VPN, reaches a completely different level.

“Big data is not just a product for business, it is serious from the point of view of the state and foreign adversaries,” says Khinshtein. “Today we live in completely different conditions, and we must understand that our enemy has already created a digital profile for every Russian.

Whether he will use this profile or not is still a big question. It is unlikely, for example, that a conventional CRA officer will be interested in an ordinary sales manager from Mytishchi. But there is a danger of creating information weapons of mass destruction. The enemy can collect many profiles of Russians, combine them and see what we, for example, fear most, and on this basis create content that will “help” us to fear even more… Here it is, the ideal digital bomb for information wars.

“Now the year has come when deepfakes have become available almost free of charge,” says Andrei Masalovich. — You can change your voice and appearance. Just last week, Ksenia Sobchak “advertised” some kind of financial pyramid. It was very convincing, although it was not the real Sobchak, but a deepfake. An unprepared person will not understand that this is a well-made fake. And it is impossible to distinguish the real fact from the fake. Accordingly, the picture of the world will be lost.

Now deepfakes have reached such a level that even in many cases it is impossible to distinguish with professional expertise whether this is an outright fake, a real photo or a real photo, but from a different area or from a different time, explained a cybersecurity expert. As a result, a person falls out of reality. Meanwhile, the basis of any information war is that if you cannot win on the battlefield, create a virtual battlefield and pretend that you have won it, and make the enemy think that he has already lost.

“All conversations, mental fluctuations are connected precisely with this: people do not discuss what is happening in reality, people discuss what they have read in these virtual worlds,” continues Masalovich. — One of the tasks of not only government agencies, but also public structures is to talk about this. Digital hygiene is no more difficult than brushing your teeth or washing your hands. But most people now don’t even understand the basics.

Parliamentarians take the same position: it is better to explain to people what they are risking when using VPN services than to ban them and not let them in.

Moreover, banning it is a simple matter. But implementing the ban is much more difficult.

– You can ban it. But it is not a fact that this ban will be so easily achievable, emphasized Alexander Khinshtein. — Technically, VPNs can be blocked. But this is a rather complex technological path. Experts say that it takes up to three weeks to put a VPN out of service. And this process is essentially endless, because the enemy will create more and more VPNs, and we will destroy them all the time.

According to Khinshtein, this is a road to nowhere. Moreover, such a ban is a bad start. This way we can reach a digital Gulag or reach an agreement on tinfoil hats, the parliamentarian believes. Before we know it, all our cellular base stations will be demolished. They are, as some believe, also harmful.

But the Internet will never again be a territory of absolute freedom. Although there is still a way to use VPN services and at the same time minimize risks. The Ministry of Digital Development has prepared a list of “white” VPNs. There are about twenty of them, and they make it possible to use all segments of the Internet with guaranteed and safe conditions. Experts believe that such applications will be most in demand among companies that require a VPN for normal operation. For example, if some of the employees work from abroad or the company has divisions scattered around the world, without secure connections it is like without hands, Andrei Masalovich is sure:

— There is a world of confrontation, where VPN is needed as a weapon, and there is a world of corporate secrecy. Let’s say a company has branches and needs secure connections. VPN is one of the simplest types of their implementation. A list of “white” VPNs is needed. If our space situation is bad, we don’t need to ban space, we need to build our own rockets. It’s the same with the Internet.