Russia VPN that filed a lawsuit against the government is branded a foreign agent
After becoming the first VPN in Russia to file a lawsuit against the Kremlin’s infamous censorship agency in October, HideMy.name was recently deemed a “foreign agent.”
Officials accused the VPN service of “spreading false information about the decisions taken by public authorities,” allegedly through the Telegram channel, with the aim of forming “a negative reputation of the public authorities of the Russian Federation.” – Roskomsvoboda, the Russian digital rights group that represents the company, told Ny Breaking.
The lawsuit was subsequently dismissed, with the judge refusing to lift the blocking order. However, HideMy.name has not given up its fight against Russian censorship and its lawyers are currently working on an appeal against the decision.
HideMy.name is still blocked in Russia
“Of course, we did not expect a miracle. No one has ever been able to win in Roskomnadzor’s home court in the past twelve years since the agency got the right to block Internet resources,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, Chief Legal Officer of Roskomsvoboda. told me.
“The legal proceedings turned out to be as completely non-transparent as the entire procedure of blocking off the register via DPI,” he added.
As we reported at the time the lawsuit was filed, the lawyers built the lawsuit precisely to challenge the lack of transparency in which the Kremlin’s censorship regulator implemented the blocking order using technical tools used to prevent threats –Technical Threat Prevention Units (TSPU)– under the Sovereign Internet Act without providing any explanation.
According to official documents Presented in court, officials described the use of the VPN software as a “threat to the security of the functioning of the Internet in Russia” after testing the software and allowing access to censored content. They then ordered that type of block accordingly. However, in its objection to the lawsuit, Roskomnadzor referred to the “threat to oppose (obstruct) the restriction of access” under the law – something that Roskomsvoboda found very strange.
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Short for Virtual Private Network, a VPN is security software that spoofs users’ IP addresses to trick the ISP into thinking they are browsing entirely from another country and granting them access to otherwise geo-restricted content. At the same time the VPN tunnel encrypts internet connections to provide better anonymity and privacy online.
“That clearly means that both the commission and the agency misclassified the source itself, because the agency does not counter the TSPU blocking in any way. However, the court did not help us deal with this,” Darbinyan explained.
“Therefore, we cannot consider the court’s decision as legal. We are going to draw the attention of the Supreme Court to this.”
The VPN provider’s new foreign agent status could also pose new problems for the company and possibly for the users who manage to continue accessing the service.
For example, under Russian law, companies branded as foreign agents are required to list and affix the appropriate label to their assets. However, not only does HideMy.name not intend to meet these requirements, but the court has also not imposed any specific requirements for the management of the VPN.
Darbinyan believes this order is a way to ultimately deter end users from interacting with HideMy.name products. Although it is not considered a crime for citizens to communicate with these services, he explained that Russian authorities may consider payment to HideMy.name as support for the activities of a foreign agent under what he described as “an of the most segregated laws of recent times.” a few years.”
He said: “I assume that the next step is for the Russian authorities to recognize such services as undesirable and extremist organizations, which would entail a ban on making donations or payments to such organizations, under penalty of criminal liability.”
Smarter and stricter VPN censorship
The case of HideMy.name certainly shows how Roskomnadzor’s censorship tactics have evolved over time.
Russia began cracking down on VPNs in 2017, with new legislation aimed at combating circumvention of government-imposed content restrictions. However, over the years the battle became more intense. This is mainly due to the sharp increase in VPN use in Russia in 2022, after the war in Ukraine and heavier internet restrictions across the board. After the passage of a new Internet sovereignty law, Darbinyan also saw Russia’s centralized censorship becoming less and less transparent.
“Now it’s not just us at Roskomsvoboda who have one registry of prohibited information for more than twelve years, but also the telecom operators themselves often do not know what Roskomnadzor is doing and blocking in their networks,” he told me.
Not just a lack of transparency, but Darbinyan said censorship is now much smarter and stricter than before. Rather than limiting itself to blocking at the IP address level, Roskomnadzor (like other censorship officials in other countries, such as China and Iran) seems to have learned to identify traffic by its signature to block the VPN protocol .
For their part, providers have responded to this new tactic by developing stealth protocols and VPN obfuscation technology to hide the fact that users have the infamous circumvention tool enabled.
Even Roskomsvoboda has built one of these solutions itself. Amnezia VPN is indeed a self-hosted free VPN that has “already proven its effectiveness on the Russian battlefield for freedom of information and privacy,” according to Darbinyan.
To make matters worse, the Kremlin has also stepped up its VPN censorship campaign with fresh new rules that, among other things, ban the publication of information on ways to circumvent content blocking.
In response to censorship, Russians are very quickly adopting VPN. The government blocks at least 42 providers, but smaller services and decentralized protocols are still available pic.twitter.com/EabxUDHUPnMay 16, 2023
That’s exactly where HideMy.name’s legal battle becomes really important as an opportunity to become a precedent that could allow more providers to challenge the Kremlin’s blocking orders.
“VPN services are removed from search engines, information about them is removed from platforms and social networks, and Google and Yandex algorithms help pessimize their organic traffic. And not every VPN provider is ready to fight for the Russian market and Russian users,” Darbinyan said.
After going through all the legal cases in Russia, the lawyers plan to take the case to the UN Human Rights Council to show the international community how far censorship in Russia has gone.
Commenting on this point, Darbinyan told me: “This process will not happen quickly. But we still hope that after the fall of the repressive regime there will come a time of thawing, legislative reform and revision of the dubious laws and decisions that have led to massive human rights violations in the country.”
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