How Putin Controls the Internet and Popular Opinion in Russia

[John Young]

This from the journalists who check with USG before publishing Snowden
documents as Snowden allegedly requires "to avoid harm to the US."

Fingerpointing at Putin is obligatory for those working the Broadcasting
Board of Governors propaganda beat.

The Internet as an unprecedented global spying and propaganda machine
has been long noted and carefully exploited by all varieties of spies and
media -- used by all governments, but by US first and foremost.

For a few years the Information Highway was perceived as a marvelous
invention for public education and discourse, even a whiz-bang tool for shaping
politics and government, empowering the citizenry. Was long before it
was understood to be a gov-com-edu-org hegemon siphoning user data
indiscriminately, some openly, some secretly.

Encryption has been advocated to maintain citizen privacy and security. That
too has been exposed as illusory, but die-hard security promoters will not
sacrifice reputation and profits for perpetuating the notion that reliable
infosec and comsec are "the best we can do, don't expect absolute
security." Meanwhile continuting to rig standards and products to fit
USG contracting requirements. Keeping up with these requirements is
a top requirement for benefiting from official secrets.

Still unrevealed by Snowden is what he did as CIA IT employee for many
years before a few months deep undercover NOC as an NSA contractor.



At 12:25 AM 9/9/2015, you wrote:
>https://theintercept.com/2015/09/08/how-putin-controls-the-russian-internet/
>The key paragraph in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan’s new book, The
>Red Web, comes surprisingly late, after the authors have described the
>long and ambitious construction of a wide-ranging, all-penetrating
>Internet surveillance and censorship system in Russia.
>...
>Just as the Soviet system discovered that it did not need to exert
>total pressure in order to control its population, so the Kremlin has
>now demonstrated that it does not need to block every byte in order to
>exert utter dominance over information.