Russia testing Its Ability to Disconnect from the Internet

Russia will test its internal RuNet network to see whether the country can function without the global internet, the Russian government announced Monday. The tests will begin after Nov. 1, recur at least annually, and possibly more frequently. It’s the latest move in a series of technical and policy steps intended to allow the Russian government to cut its citizens off from the rest of the world.


“On Monday, the government approved the provision on conducting exercises to ensure the stable, safe and holistic functioning of the Internet and public communications networks in the Russian Federation,” notes an article in D-Russia. (The original article is in Russian. We verified a translation with the help of a native Russian speaker.) “The exercises are held at the federal (in the territory of the Russian Federation) and regional (in the territory of one or more constituent entities of the Russian Federation) levels.” 

The word “holistic” shows that the exercises follow April’s passage of the sovereign internet law that will require all internet traffic in Russia to pass through official chokepoints, allowing the government to shut down outside access, block websites that they don’t like, and monitor traffic. 

In 2016, Russia launched the Closed Data Transfer Segment: basically, a big military intranet for classified data, similar to the Pentagon’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. The following year, Russia announced that it intends to build its own domain name directory, which would allow it to re-route traffic intended for one website to another. And last year, Putin’s top IT advisor Herman Klimenko and others suggested that the military intranet, properly expanded, might be able to carry the rest of the country’s internet traffic. Klimenko cautioned that moving to the new system would be painful — and as recently as March, Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, expressed skepticism that Russia would succeed. 


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