The Real Russia. Today. An Internet freedom controversy, ‘Königsberg,’ and Russian pounds sterling

Monday, April 30, 2018

• Russia's censor blocks another LGBT website
• A television station airs a subversive ad supporting Telegram
• A leftist activist is detained and allegedly burned in police custody
• Meduza examines the controversy behind Mail.ru Group's Internet freedom initiative
• Does Roskomnadzor owe its mistakes to incompetence or sabotage?
• The wrong word costs an Aeroflot stewardess her job
• Kaliningrad's governor fires an advisor with a dubious past
• British lawmakers consider cracking down on billions of dollars Russians have invested in UK offshores
• Navalny and Moscow City Hall can't agree on the May 5 protest

Russian Internet censorship ⛔️

🏳️‍🌈 Just don't call it homophobia

Russia’s federal censor has blocked the LGBT health awareness website Parni Plus (Guys Plus). The site’s administrators say they received a notice from Roskomnadzor on April 28 informing them about a January 26 ruling by a district court in the Altai Territory to block Parni Plus for distributing information that “challenges family values” and “propagates non-traditional sexual relations.” The paperwork from Roskomnadzor did not specify what content broke the law, and the notice came so late that the website missed its opportunity to appeal the verdict.

Launched in 2008, Parni Plus offers readers advice on LGBT sexual health and family relations, as well as information about living with HIV. In March 2018, Roskomnadzor started enforcing a separate court order to block Gay.ru for “gay propaganda.”

📺 Wink wink TV

The Russian television network STS inserted a little subversion into its advertisements over the weekend for Saturday and Sunday broadcasts of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. The commercials show footage of the 2017 film “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” and the narration loosely describes the plot, but listen carefully and you’ll realize that the ads actually compare Captain Jack Sparrow to Pavel Durov, whose instant messenger Telegram has flouted Russia’s Internet censor for more than two weeks now.

“First, they wanted to take the keys, but he didn’t give them up,” says the narrator at the start of the promo, clearly referring to the Telegram encryption keys demanded by Russia’s Federal Security Service. “And there was a trial, and there was a verdict, but the cunning Sparrow found another way and stole a waggon from under everyone’s nose.” Stealing a wagon is hardly the highlight of “Pirates of the Caribbean” 5, but in Russian the word for “wagon” is “telega,” which has become slang for “Telegram.”

You can watch the commercial here on Facebook.

👮‍♂️ Don't speak ill of Johnny Law

Police officers from an anti-extremism unit in Tomsk reportedly beat up a leftist activist in custody over the weekend. According to his lawyer, Maxim Shulgin was detained on Sunday with nine other activists, following a raid on the office of the “Left Bloc” movement. Shulgin says officers attacked him in their patrol car, holding him against the vehicle’s heating vents and burning him.

He’s reportedly being charged with inciting hatred against the police through posts on the social network Vkontakte. The officers also apparently indicated that they suspect Left Bloc could have ties to the anti-fascist activists arrested in Penza and St. Petersburg for allegedly planning terrorist attacks ahead of the March presidential election and summer FIFA World Cup.

🤔 Mail.ru Group’s “Internet freedom” controversy

Mail.ru Group, which owns Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, announced on April 27 that it is sharing three servers “for stable access to any [Internet] services.” In other words, the company is making available three proxy servers that allow users to bypass barriers erected by Roskomnadzor. IT experts Vladislav Zdolnikov and Mikhail Klimarev, however, warn against using Mail.ru’s proxies.

Klimarev says two of the three IP addresses shared by Mail.ru Group were caught “hunting” for VPNs and proxy servers on April 24. In other words, these servers were used to help track ways to bypass the blocking of Telegram. Klimarev says Mail.ru Group operates a special “Web crawler” bot that scans the Internet for all possible IP addresses in search of proxy servers that connect directly to Telegram’s known servers. If the bot finds a suspicious proxy, it mimics a Telegram server, to avoid giving itself away, and tries to verify whether that particular proxy connects to Telegram’s servers. If the test comes up positive, the bot creates instructions for an abuse claim, which Mail.Ru allegedly files with server hosts, which then block that server, not even realizing that it was being used by Telegram.

Klimarev says the Internet Protection Society discovered the Mail.ru Web crawlers on April 24, when several of its proxy servers were blocked by their hosts because of “abuse claims.” He says the proxies were blocked almost immediately after they were visited by Mail.ru’s servers, leading the organization to conclude that they’d been flagged by the company's Web crawlers.

What's Mail.ru Group's response? The company later stated that the proxy-hunting Web crawlers using its servers belonged to one of its cloud-computing clients. The company’s representatives say the customer was banned, after Mail.ru realized what was happening. It’s unclear, however, why two of the IP addresses used by these Web crawlers share the same IP addresses as the proxy servers Mail.ru offered up on April 27 to circumvent Russia’s Telegram ban. The company has not explained this coincidence.

🤔 Incompetence or sabotage?

Meduza spoke to an IT expert who says he’s sure that somebody inside Russia’s federal censor is trying to sabotage the much-hated agency: “When a cigar isn't just a cigar: Russia's federal censor briefly blocked some of the Internet's biggest websites, and experts wonder if it wasn't an inside job”

You're fired! 👉

✈️ The stewardess

The Russian airline Aeroflot fired a stewardess over the weekend after Moscow State University television school Dean Vitaly Tretyakov complained on Twitter that his flight to Kaliningrad was announced in English as a “Moscow-Königsberg” trip. “Can Aeroflot really name Russian cities however it wants?” Tretyakov wrote angrily on Friday, April 27.

Aeroflot says it fired the flight’s head stewardess after she confessed to referring to Kaliningrad by its German name in her PA announcement in English. (The USSR acquired the territory from East Prussia in the Potsdam Agreement, after World War II.) Tretyakov, meanwhile, insists that the announcement was made by a man, and says he worries the stewardess is covering for the flight’s captain.

🗂 The advisor

Kaliningrad Governor Anton Alikhanov briefly appointed a new construction and housing advisor who apparently was a witness in a 2015 murder trial against a Russian nationalist. Leonid Simunin testified in the case against Ilya Goryachev, who was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killing of the lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Goryachev’s group, the Russian Nationalists’ Combat Organization, reportedly had contact with the Kremlin through Simunin, who has also served as a pro-Kremlin youth activist and advised separatist leaders in Donetsk. When testifying in 2015, Simunin said he coordinated many projects with Goryachev, but never heard anything about murders or the Russian Nationalists’ Combat Organization.

Hours after Novyi Kaliningrad reported on Simunin’s history, Governor Alikhanov fired him and thanked the news media for bringing Simunin's background to his attention. “Of course, a person with such dubious experience won't be my advisor,” the governor said, explaining that his administration hired Simunin without his knowledge.

Russian pounds sterling 🇬🇧

Russian citizens have reportedly squirreled away more than £34 billion ($46.7 billion) in British overseas territories, according to experts at campaign group Global Witness, which says most of this money (£30 billion — about $41.2 billion) is in the British Virgin Islands. The total amount of Russians’ money allegedly invested in British overseas territories is five times greater than the sum directly held in the UK.

British lawmakers are currently preparing to vote on a bill that will force the territories to unmask corrupt individuals holding “dirty money” in their jurisdictions. Prime Minister Theresa May promised to freeze Russian assets and money in response to the attempted murder of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in March.

Navalny's next showdown ✊

Moscow City Hall and opposition activist Alexey Navalny have failed to come to an agreement about the location of his planned May 5 protest against Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term. Navalny insists on marching demonstrators down Tverskaya Street to Manege Square, just outside the Kremlin. Officials offered him a permit for a rally about two miles from the city’s center, on Sakharov Prospekt. Navalny says the more remote venue is unacceptable and is calling his supporters to the city’s center for an unsanctioned protest. Vladimir Putin’s next inauguration will take place on May 7.

In 2012, a day before Putin’s last inauguration, several thousand people protested against Putin’s return to the Kremlin. More than 30 demonstrators were later convicted of inciting or inflicting violence on police officers in a controversial campaign known as the “Bolotnaya Square Case.”