[ooni-talk] [Report] New blocks emerge in Russia amid war in Ukraine: An OONI network measurement analysis

[Maria Xynou]

Hello,

I hope you are all safe and well. My deepest solidarity to all those
affected by the war in Ukraine.

Today OONI published a *research report on new censorship events in Russia*
amid the war in Ukraine, based on OONI data analysis.

You can read the report here:
https://ooni.org/post/2022-russia-blocks-amid-ru-ua-conflict/

*# Key Findings*

*## Russia*

** Media censorship.* Russia recently started blocking access to
independent Russian news media websites (such as Dozhd and New Times) and
foreign news media websites (such as BBC, Deutsche Welle, Russian version
of Voice of America, and RFE/RL service websites).

** Blocking of a website about captured and killed Russian soldiers.*
Russia blocked access to 200rf.com, which was created by representatives of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine to share information about
captured and killed Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

** Centralized throttling of Twitter.* OONI data suggests that access to
twitter.com was throttled in Russia between 26th February 2022 to 4th March
2022. As the throttling of twitter.com seems to have stopped across all
ISPs in Russia at the same time (~08:00 on 4th March 2022 UTC), it appears
to have been centralized. Moreover, interference to twitter.com appears to
have changed from throttling to blocking (through the injection of a RST
packet) on 4th March 2022.

** Blocking of Facebook and Twitter.* OONI data shows that access to
facebook.com and twitter.com was blocked in Russia by 4th March 2022
(primarily through the injection of RST packets).

** Decentralized censorship.* Every Internet Service Provider (ISP) in
Russia is responsible for implementing government-mandated blocks
independently. As a result, we observe variance in how internet censorship
is implemented across Russia, as blocks are not implemented on all networks
in the country, and different ISPs adopt different censorship techniques.
Some ISPs implement blocks through the use of multiple techniques at the
same time, making circumvention harder.

** Different censorship techniques.* To block websites, OONI data shows
that Russian ISPs adopt the following censorship techniques (beyond
throttling):

* DNS manipulation, redirecting in some cases to blockpages
* HTTP man-in-the-middle, serving blockpages
* TLS man-in-the-middle
* Injection of a RST packet after the ClientHello during the TLS handshake
(most prevalent)
* Timing out the session after the ClientHello during the TLS handshake
* Closing the connection after the ClientHello during the TLS handshake

*## EU*

Following the recent decision of the Council of the European Union to
suspend the broadcasting activities of Sputnik and Russia Today (RT) in the
EU, some EU countries have started to implement blocks.

OONI data shows that EU countries like Greece, France,  Romania, Spain,
Poland, and Germany have started blocking rt.com.

Moreover, we observe the blocking of sputniknews.com in several European
countries, such as France, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

Following requests by the European Commission, Google has removed results
pertaining to rt.com and sputniknews.com from Google Search for users in
the EU. Similarly, Facebook and Twitter are geo-blocking EU users from
accessing RTNews.

Learn more though our report:
https://ooni.org/post/2022-russia-blocks-amid-ru-ua-conflict/

~ OONI team.
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