Russia’s federal censorship has been throttling YouTube’s playback speed for about a month, just as it slowed Twitter’s data transfer speed in 2021. In August, Russian internet users reported sudden and widespread outages in accessing popular apps and services such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, and more. While the crackdown on RuNet has become a familiar feature of the Putin regime, its technical side is difficult to understand.

To learn more about the scientific background of Russian Internet censorship and surveillance, Meduza spoke to Sarkis Darbinyana senior legal advisor to digital rights group RKS Global (which recently published a report entitled “State of Surveillance: A Study on How the Russian State, Through Laws and Technology, Carries Out Digital Surveillance”) and Philipp DietrichProject manager for the project “Risks of the sovereign Internet for Russia and beyond” at the DGAP’s Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia.

Timestamp for this episode:

• (3:58) The technical dark side of internet throttling
• (6:24) Telegram’s public role and past political controversies in Russia
• (10:05) Police surveillance tools and data leaks
• (7:15 p.m.) Meet SORM, the FSB surveillance system
• (30:54) VPNs, Google Global Cache and the Internet’s CDN infrastructure