Quote Originally Posted by nulle View Post
Why Latvia is in yellow color?
Our internet is not censored in any way.
No, not massively and nothing that you couldn't get around if you really wanted to. But internet across the EU is monitored to varying degree. For certain types of activities. Terrorist, pedophilia etc. Intercepting certain emails.

Plus, there is a rather interesting encryption and monitoring war going on between the major political powers.
I got just the tiniest bit of insight into this a few years ago when I was working for a telecom company that provides some of the internet backbone infrastructure in Europe. I heard some information in third and fourth hand and it's all very secretive and hush-hush. But there is definitely spying going on.

Both industrial and military monitoring. In your case, some of Russia's internet traffic probably goes through Latvia and it is virtually certain that both local and international interests are trying to monitor that. In order for that to be possible to monitor foreign internet traffic passing through, they have to get access to the messages of the citizens of the local country too. Read up on it, you'll be surprised. This has been a big issue in Sweden where there is an incredibly intrusive law which lets intelligence intercept all information that crosses national borders. It's equivalent to opening a personal letter and reading the content. There were massive demonstrations and petitions against it but the state simply ignored all the protests and said it was a matter of national security. This kind of stuff qualifies as censorship and I am sure Latvia has it too. Plus there is monitoring of extremist websites and attempts at intercepting emails from certain types of groups. There are phony websites and operations to catch peadophiles and drug dealers etc.

The only comfort is that the serious military monitoring apparatus is not interested in things like filesharing and hacking peoples facebook accounts or whatever "junior hackers" get up to. What they do is top secret. Nobody really knows. Somehow I doubt that they can accomplish much, after all, quite unbreakable encryption exists nowadays. But they probably feel they have to try.

But a giveaway that it is serious is that the US has just recently declared that a cyber attack against US interests on the internet can be considered an act of war which can be retaliated against with conventional weapons. They must have said that for a good reason.

In the US there was a scandal a few years ago when it was discovered that the FBI was quite shamelessly breaking the law and had set up an entire spy station inside a major telco hub in San Francisco if I remember correctly. Some telco employee discovered it by chance and went to the media. It was quite big news in the IT world because techies in the US had not realised that this sort of thing was going on.

I already mentioned the Menwith Hall facility that is a rather large US base in the UK which has as its main purpose to intercept internet traffic and monitor it. If you look at a picture of it, it looks like something from a different planet with some massive round buildings and lots of really large satellites.
It's top secret and nobody really knows what they are doing, or why.

The places that are safest from interception are those where the nation is too poor to do it, and lacks technical skills and resources. Like Africa. The countries that started using the internet a bit later than the forefront countries are at a bit of a disadvantage because they had to "tap in" to the infrastructure that had already been created for the early starters like the US, Japan and the Northern part of Europe.

The tips for people who want to be sure they are incognito online, use TOR or buy a VPN or proxy in another country. Or buy a mobile connetion stick for cash and use it somewhere other than your own house.

The top spots for monitoring on the internet are the global hubs and exit points from certain countries that are treated with suspicion. It is believed that they simply search for certain keywords and patterns automatically, and when something "interesting" is flagged by the computers analysts look into it manually.

Here is a picture of the underwater cables of the internet backbone. All of this is rather interesting and there is a LOT of politics and military activities surrounding the management of the physical and virtual internet.