They get the systems in place, they run drills to get the population used to the idea, then they close specific sectors, then they close everything and have special "open sectors" and then you're fucked.
Don't fall for it.
Like it or not, but Facebook and Google sitting in the US, collecting massive amounts of private data from people all over the world, while the NSA just taps straight into exchanges, like the DE-CIX, means that the Internet is an inherently very hostile place to any non-Five eyes [0] actors.
It's also for those above reasons that Russia and China have massive local social media alternatives, they don't want their citizen's data to end up on US servers.
For countries like Russia and China, it's actually important to make sure their digital infrastructure doesn't fall apart the moment a US company, or those aligned with Five-Eye interests, decide to shut them out.
Second, many governments (not just Russian one) have been very effective at censorship without disconnecting from the Internet. China is the only county that does both censorship and 'the Great Firewall'. Saudi Arabia is perfectly capable of very strict censorship without doing what China did to the very same extent. AFAIK Facebook, YouTube, Twitter are all accessible in KSA and are used by millions of Saudis on a daily basis.
They don't want to turn off western media, they want to turn off people like Navalny and thousands of government critics who use facebook, telegram and youtube, plus Russian anti-gove media located abroad for the safety reasons, like Meduza.
They've already tried to block telegram and failed, now they are going a more radical way.
You can't substitute wars with censorship, quite the opposite, they often go together. Not because one of them is cause, because both are consequences of authoritarianism.
> Eventually the Russian government wants all domestic traffic to pass through these routing points. This is believed to be part of an effort to set up a mass censorship system akin to that seen in China, which tries to scrub out prohibited traffic.
The internet is fragmenting.
You can unfortunately retain a lot of the utility of the internet while simultaneously sucking out the ability for it to be effectively used for political activity if you're willing to build the infrastructure required.
More than 17 millions of IP addresses were blocked in 2018 [1][2] including large segments of Google/Amazon/Azure/DO/Linode etc. Although recently roskomnadzor unblocked most of them (perhaps due to the spread of DPI among internet providers, so they able to deal with https now and act more accurately), but ~800,000 IPs remains blocked. The government doesn't give a shit about creating a bad reputation for online business in Russia. Instead, actively engaged in "import substitution", e.g. making Сhina-like isolated payment card system [3] or spending millions for "national search engine" [4] (currently bankrupt, AFAIK). They are seems to be totally OK with isolation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/russia-blocks-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Ru...
The Treaty of Bern is my go-to example. See, after mail ("snail" mail, not email) had been invented countries thought like you did, we must exert our control over this for our own good. So to get a letter from Scotland to Switzerland you'd need to relay it in steps, to enter each country it would need to conform to the laws of that country.
So you'd write a Swiss letter, conforming to Swiss rules with Swiss stamps, you'd place that inside a French letter, with French stamps conveying an instruction to relay it to the Swiss border, and then place that inside a British letter with local postage affixed which asked that it be relayed to France.
This would take considerable time, and failed if the route unexpectedly took your letter to the wrong country. It was a monumental pain in the arse, and for what?
So, the Treaty says No, don't do any of that. Everybody who signs the treaty gets to send and receive letters, it traverses borders, and the costs will all come out in the wash anyway the sending country chooses the pricing and you use their stamps wherever the letter is going. Everybody signed.
what doesn't work one way can simply be done another when you convince enough people to be afraid
edit: I was talking about starlink. Assumed that Elon Musk named it skynet
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
Not when your default nameserver is 8.8.8.8. Or your NTP source is set to the public NTP pools.
There is definitely a benefit in doing a "we are isolated" scenario test once in a while to prepare for such incidents...
For a more blatant example take a look at the dependency of US emergency services on private communication companies like Calif. wildfire fighters having their communications disrupted because Verizon throttled their bandwidth.
At first sight a mildly interesting anecdote, but in reality, it's a massive flaw in the US's approach to infrastructure. If anybody really wanted to "cyber" the US they would only need to attack the private communication providers, like Verizon, and will not only take down the public spread of information/communication, but also completely disrupt the civilian emergency response forces attempting to react to whatever else the adversary might be attacking with, for an attacker it's a win-win.
Sure, the US military has its own hardened communication, but all the rest of the US American society? They will be left out in complete information and communication blackout.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
The BBC title is a little misleading in that it sort of implied permanency rather than it being a “test of the emergency system”, to borrow a phrase.
This seems like a very logical test for all countries to carry out. Certainly not enough to suggest it's some sort of precursor to Chinese level censorship if this action is all that's based on.
> Certainly not enough to suggest it's some sort of precursor to Chinese level censorship if this action is all that's based on.
That technical capability is an essential precursor to building a clone of the great firewall. After that, the censorship is just a matter of adding firewall rules.
Everyone in western media assumes the primary motivation is outgoing connections / censorship.
[1] - https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Who is 'countries'? The president? The deep state?
I am not sure I want anyone but a group of decentralized nerds in control of this. And that control be optional.
> Russia is considering whether to disconnect from the global internet briefly, as part of a test of its cyber-defences.
Sounds scary. But than clarifies:
> The test will mean data passing between Russian citizens and organisations stays inside the nation rather than being routed internationally.
Which contradicts the previous sentence: Russia is not planning to disconnect from the global internet briefly.
I so disappointed at BBC for spreading misinformation.
Randomly downing a few servers is often seen as good practice in ops to test for resiliency, and see how well things hold up as they are supposed to.
We will all learn a lot from it.
Of course it won't be good for Russians in the long run ...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/the-splinternet-an-internet-...
China already did do this first. All their internet traffic already passes through government controlled choke points, and their citizens primarily use domestic Chinese-only systems, at least partially because foreign competitors are blocked. The things Russia is testing here are some basic capabilities of a great-firewall type system.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/09/11/apple-begins-stor...
Not with a steered beam. Unless another satellite is riding shotgun on the one you are aiming at you will need some manner to receive the signal directly in order to triangulate. That's easy when the transmitter is non-directional but very hard when the direction is 'up' and the beam is focused and aimed at a specific satellite. You'll still get quite a bit of spread but you will need multiple simultaneous receptions in order to be able to pinpoint the origin of the transmitter.
Maybe you will have to transport yourself out to the tundra to get clear signal.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
