originally built out with government control in
mind,” he said.
“When it comes to censorship, the only ones who
can really do it are the Chinese,” said Serge Droze,
a senior security engineer at Swiss-based Proton
Technologies, which offers software for creating
“virtual private networks,” or VPNs, a principal tool
for circumventing state censorship.
ProtonVPN, which Droze says has been inventive
in finding ways to circumvent Russian blocking,
reports clocking ten times as many daily signups
than before the war. VPN services tracked by
researchers at Top10VPN.com found Facebook
and Twitter downloads surging eight times
higher than average. Its research found the
Kremlin to have blocked more than 270 news
and financial sites since the invasion, including
BBC News and Voice of America’s Russian-
language services.
Russia’s elites are believed to be big VPN users. No
one expects them to disconnect.
Russian authorities are also having some success
blocking the privacy-protecting Tor browser,
which like VPNs lets users visit content at
special ”.onion” sites on the so-called dark web,
researchers say. Twitter just created a Tor site;
other outlets such as The New York Times also
have them.
The Kremlin has not, however, blocked the
popular Telegram messaging app. It’s an
important conduit for Ukrainian government
ministries and also for Meduza, the Latvia-
based independent Russian-language news
organization whose website is blocked in Russia.
Meduza has 1 million followers on Telegram.