Thread: Belarus and foreign websites

SOPA is a very sad thing and I hope it does not succeed. Stateside, everybody I talk to hates the idea, even among the recent frothing madness of romney. Yet there's a feeling like it's not a thing we have any say in, that it's being decided for us. Only a feeling, logic doesn't support it. Still.

What methods do we have to verify our level of freedom on the internet? I'm not the expert you are in IT, Hanna, but I don't know where I'd even go to verify this, or to get a fair reading of it. And I'm cynical that we'll be guaranteed access to such tools in the future.

Is there a feeling that you are not trusted on the internet in Belarus? Or, that you are being watched? And, in general, is there such a sense in Belarus, about being watched, as is common in Russia (or seems to be, mind you I've not yet been there)? I'm interested in how this law impacts the hearts and minds of the Belarussian.

Originally Posted by Hanna

After reading what Dmitry Khomitchuk said (who after all has a personal interest in this), I am saying that the impact of the law is probably exaggerated. There is a propaganda war against Belarus so it's natural that something like this is used.

Lots of countries have more internet monitoring and censorship than Belarus.
Australia, South Korea, France, Thailand and China to mention places where you might find yourself on holiday or business. You have more reason to worry there, than in Belarus.

In the USA you should start worrying about SOPA for example (own goal by Pavelov to link to an article about that, lol!)

This map is from Wikipedia's entry on internet censorship




Wikipedia quotes







But let's get to the bottom of this.

I have read the articles now, and just to re-assure myself, I'd like to ask anyone who is in Belarus to try three things:

1) Go to the most anti-government / anti-Lukashenko website you know of (in Russian) and make sure it is not blocked for you.
2) Go to a site that does not have a .by extension and check if you are able to buy something online. (I mean, don't actually buy anything, just check if it is possible to take the purchase up to the point of sale without actually buying.
3) Have you got unrestricted access to the site Vkontakte.ru?

If both these things are possible, then we have proved that the law is nothing to worry about.


And make no mistake - I hate internet monitoring and am all for a completely free internet. But it does not seem to me that the situation in Belarus sticks out as a big problem.

I think this picture from Wiki can't be trusted (no idea who put it on there). They have no data for Japan, still they are claiming both North and South Koreas to have the same level of censorship, that's completely insane! Those poor people in North Korea would be executed for the very fact of having a PC at home.

Also, still "under surveillance" seems better than "selective censorship", then why did you say Australia had harsher censorship than Belarus?

KidK, if you want to stay up to date on the Internet freedom situation, then start following the Net neutrality debate, and sites like Torrentfreak.com. The internet is the only reasonably free and fair information outlet today. It is incredibly powerful. I think politicians and big business are getting seriously worried about its power. They would like to take the sting / edge off it, exploit it financially and monitor it. Us normal people have to try and stop it, whether we live in the US, China, Belarus or France.

Really, a person who lives there should answer KidK's questions about the situation in Belarus.

But it wouldn't surprised me if the Belarussians who read the rants above just gave up in despair or got pissed off, not to come back. So I will give my opinion on it.

My point is that practically all information about Belarus in English is totally skewed and painting an exagerated and false picture.
I repeat what I said before - it's nothing short of a propaganda war.
People like Pavelov et al have swallowed this propaganda whole, and are relaying the information exactly as intended.

It would be totally wrong to say that Belarus is a country without any problems, there are plenty of challenges. But just because it's not dancing to the US' and EUs tune does not automatically make it evil... (Unless you are working in psychological warfare at the CIA.)
And let [the country that] is free of sin throw the first stone, right... ? None mentioned, none forgotten.

It seems impossible to read the word Belarus without reading "the last dictatorship in Europe". The hype around it is totally ridiculous, in anything from travelling books to newspapers and cheezy websites like the ones above.
I actually believed some of it myself, until I saw with my own eyes that it was nonsense.

Both my guide book and several travel websites were warning that "the KGB may tail you in Belarus, they may search your bags while you are away from your hotel room" etc, etc. Needless to say, nobody could have cared less about what I got up to, least of all the KGB.

Other false claims: "Hotel staff spies on the guests and local people are afraid to speak to foreigners."
"Everybody is really poor and will try to skim you for money" (quite the opposite was true - everyone was super-honest and it is probably the safest country in Europe). "Border guards are corrupt" All of this is untrue. If I had found any of it to be true, I would be more than happy to share the examples.

There was some media coverage of protests in Minsk while I was there. I can honestly say I noticed nothing. Likewise there were allegedly long queues to money changing offices. But I saw no queues longer than what you regularly see in the UK (although it should be noted that there is a very high number of changing offices in Belarus - there IS a genuine problem with inflation and a shortage of Euro/dollar)
Either I was completely blind or the problem was seriously exaggerated.

I asked several people about their feelings about the government etc. Perhaps a bit rude, but I was curious to hear what different types of people thought.

Those who didn't like the government were more than happy to tell me all about it while strangers were listening (in a serious dictatorship, they would have been cautious) Lots of people said that they supported the current government on the whole. Two people asked me to try to change peoples view on Belarus and explain that its not a bad country. One woman said it was a dictatorship, but a reasonably good one and that this was preferable to the alternatives.

If the Belarussians get cut off from the internet, or unable to speak their minds online, then I'd be the first to join a protest group and get involved. But I honestly don't think that's happened. I will keep an eye though - if there is anything to it, I'd like to know because I really liked this country and the people.

I really hope someone from Belarus could check the three things that I mentioned above, so that all of us can know for sure.

Originally Posted by Eric C.

I think this picture from Wiki can't be trusted (no idea who put it on there). They have no data for Japan, still they are claiming both North and South Koreas to have the same level of censorship, that's completely insane! Those poor people in North Korea would be executed for the very fact of having a PC at home.

Also, still "under surveillance" seems better than "selective censorship", then why did you say Australia had harsher censorship than Belarus?

Well that map was one of Wikipedias fancy interactive svg pictures, so I'd guess that it's been put together by one of their more senior contributors.

North Koreans can typically not access the internet at all, even if they have a computer (which some do - you are wrong there.) They have a sort of national intranet with forums and news. Censored. The North Koreans will not get "executed for having a computer at home". Did you make that up? Else, state your source! In fact, a computer can be bought at the market there, and according to what I have read, it is not unusual for upper middle class people there to have a computer. But it is true that they cannot use the internet. Obviously a state of serious censorship. Probably there was no data for North Korea available.

South Korea blocks all sites related to pro-North Korea information, and that alone qualifies them as a country with quite serious restrictions. South Koreans who want to read such information have to use foreign proxy servers and risk prison.

Australia, due to its geography is able to restrict people's access much easier than almost any other country. Their censoring is for child porn and suspected terror related sites. Also, random filesharing sites. But some rather surprising sites made it onto the list, and the majority of Australians are furious about the restrictions.

We have yet to get proof that Belarus blocks any sites at all.

I interpreted "selective censorship" as less serious than "under surveillance" based on the colouring and the wording. Regardless, Belarus seems to have the same level as Russia and there is no restrictions in Russia, this topic has already come up on the forum and the Russians have said that there is absolutely no monitoring.

Alternative map


And finally: US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law

New comments about this law was posted by government.

As I said.

1) Belarusian companies, that use Internet to provide services in Belarus should use belarusian internet resources. Providing services outside Belarus without using belarusian internet services is allowed. Foreign companies are not affected by this law.
Некоторые положения этого закона уже давно действуют в качестве предписания. Например, белорусские интернет-магазины должны быть размещены на .by сайтах.

2) When using public internet facilities, you should show your ID.
Это положение также действует уже более года.

3) Only government-owned facilities should block forbidden websites. List of forbidden websites will consist of porno, extremism, terrorism, etc. It will be public list. Government and people can create offer to block website.
Это положение также ранее действовало в виде инструкций правительства. Предприятия, управляемые государством, должны были ограничить доступ работников к порнографии, террористическим сайтам и т.д. Почти все частные компании запрещают своим сотрудникам посещать определенный набор сайтов на рабочем месте. Чем государство хуже?

Таким образом закон только формализует уже действующие положения и устанавливает административную ответственность за невыполнение. Замечу административную, а не уголовную.

В интернете возникли дикие слухи, которые ссылаются на другие слухи. Никаких ссылок на источники - ничего.

NO RESTRICTIONS FOR PRIVATE PERSONS.

President in his speach said, that at home people can do what they want.

Hanna wanted some websites.
1) Image 1325810339-clip-195kb.jpg
2) Image 1325810426-clip-227kb.jpg
3) Image 1325810456-clip-78kb.jpg

Almost every IT company in Belarus works with foreign customers.

Government spent near 10 years to build special low tax IT Area. Don't you think it is stupid to break 10 years efforts by forbidding Internet?

P.S. Please help to translate from Russian to English. I don't know how to say it in English.

If you needed a case study, keep on eye Belarus, which has just illegalized the use of foreign websites.

So this means that Belarussian people/companies are forbidden to host their websites outside Belarus?

Belarusian companies that provide services in Belarus should host their websites in Belarus.
Non-commercial sites can be hosted outside Belarus.
Belarusian companies that provide services outside Belarus can host their websides outside Belarus.

Why Latvia is in yellow color?
Our internet is not censored in any way.

Originally Posted by nulle

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.

Oh, I'd forgotten, thanks Seraph.
Forgot to also say that there is a sort of encyption war going on as well, whereby American companies are not allowed to sell any type of encryption that the CIA can't decrypt. The idea is that all encryption that exists should be within US intelligence's capabilities to decrypt. Seems to me that couldn't be the case since some of the best cryptographers in the world are not Americans. But I don't know much about this, or how it works. It's fairly sensitive though and there are some IT products that Europeans cannot buy due to this law, I remember hearing about it through work a few years ago.

Export of cryptography in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



This (below) is what I was talking about with regards to Sweden. It's a really creepy law which lets them spy on telco and internet in a really efficient way. Sweden should be red on that map, really. When people complained and demonstrated, the prime minister eventually alluded to the situation with 80% of Russian internet traffic passing through Sweden, and that the law was for "national security". This just pissed most sensible people off even more. Then, later, it emerged the law was the result of pressure from the US. RT in this case has the story exactly right but only geeky Swedes, like me, are aware of it.

So you don't have to be Belarussian to worry about this! Everyone has a reason to at least consider it, including Americans and people in the EU.

And everyone should consider what happens if Facebook or Gmail/Google goes "evil" with all your personal data. People talk about the creepiness of organisations like the German "Stasi". Then they happily give out 100 times more information then Stasi could have found out about them in their wildest dreams... to a privately owned corporation in a foreign country.

Originally Posted by Hanna

And everyone should consider what happens if Facebook or Gmail/Google goes "evil" with all your personal data. People talk about the creepiness of organisations like the German "Stasi". Then they happily give out 100 times more information then Stasi could have found out about them in their wildest dreams... to a privately owned corporation in a foreign country.

You see, the point is, "privately owned companies" just mind their own business, and are not up to pursuing people, throwing them in jail, executing them, etc. In fact, the "companies" that you should avoid giving out your personal information to are dictatorial governments/regimes that do have resources to ruin your life and feel like using them all the time.

PS. I've been constantly hearing from you the same thing repeated hundreds of times, like "everyone is waging an informational war on Belarus, etc." But why do you think they picked that country in the first place? There are some around it that are not NATO or EU members either. Let's say Ukraine. But the "informational war" is only being waged on Belarus. Doesn't it make you think there MIGHT BE something about it?

Originally Posted by Eric C.

You see, the point is, "privately owned companies" just mind their own business, and are not up to pursuing people, throwing them in jail, executing them, etc. In fact, the "companies" that you should avoid giving out your personal information to are dictatorial governments/regimes that do have resources to ruin your life and feel like using them all the time.

I don't agree with that at all!
Companies/corporations are driven by the need to constantly generate a profit for the owners/shareholders. In the interest of achieving this, they will do just about anything that is not likely to backfire on them and ruin their repution or cost a heavy price in fines.
But examples of companies routinely using unethical business practices are:

Companies that pollute. Essentially, they will pollute just as much as a government lets them get away with. Consider China for example.
Drug companies that knowingly sell dangerous drugs to poorer countries, or deliberately drum up the prices of life-saving drugs in richer countries.
Tobacco companies lacing cigarettes with extra nicotine to create a strong addiction to their products.
-The weapons and security industries in the US and UK quite openly lobbying for wars
-Infant forumula being pushed as miracle food in Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of babies.
-Food industry: Dangerous but cheap ingredients added to food to trick consumers to believe that the food tastes or looks better.
-The banks and their manipulation of world economics, irresponsible lending and wild speculation on the stock market. That brought about the current financial crisis.

And if you are afraid of data ending up in the wrong hands - if a company was faced with bankrupcy and being banned from carrying out business..... or handing over sensitive data to a government, I wouldn't want to bet my future on them protecting my privacy!

PS. I've been constantly hearing from you the same thing repeated hundreds of times, like "everyone is waging an informational war on Belarus, etc." But why do you think they picked that country in the first place? There are some around it that are not NATO or EU members either. Let's say Ukraine. But the "informational war" is only being waged on Belarus. Doesn't it make you think there MIGHT BE something about it?

Agreed. There may very well be valid problems in Belarus, I am almost certain of it. Lukashenko's government has probably carried on with a few practices from the Soviet era that most younger people don't appreciate. Sure, the Belarussian opposition groups are largely financed by foreign funds, but that does not mean they don't have valid points of complaints. I don't know the answers.
But whatever the problems or the solutions are, it is for the Belarussians to judge and take action on, isn't it?

Also, travelling through both Ukraine and Belarus I got the distinct impression that Belarus was in a much better state of repair, including the countryside and smaller places. Also, there were no unemployed people in Belarus whereas in Ukraine there were plenty. Both Latvia and Poland have over 15% unemployment. Belarus has under 1%. In this respect, the Belarussian gov't has done a better job. Prices to me were similar between UA and BY and I think that salaries are quite similar too.

I'd consider getting involved with the politics of another country and expressing a strong opinion if I heard about mass imprisonment of regular people for minor political offenses, politically motivated executions or brutal police oppression of the majority in the country. I have seen or heard about nothing like that so far. Likewise, if anyone from Belarus appeared on this forum and gave some concrete examples of having been seriously mistreated by the state there.

Belarus conducts a more independent policy and it is comparatively pro-Russian.

Originally Posted by Marcus

Belarus conducts a more independent policy and it is comparatively pro-Russian.

...than Ukraine you mean? Yeah, seems like it to me too.

One thing that I noticed when I travelled in these countries was that everybody has family and friends in Russia or one of the other CIS countries. So they are able to keep themselves well informed and compare their own conditions with their relatives elsewhere. Lots of people were born in a different Soviet republic and just ended up a citizen of whatever contry they happened to be living in in 1991. Some people appear to have left in a hurry in 1991 and moved elsewhere. In Belarus, they had a big nationalistic campaign in progress to make all these people identify with Belarus, despite their bakground.

than Ukraine you mean?

Yes.

This politics section sucks. Most are brainwashed ex-Soviets and then the rest are westernized brain dead zombies.

American companies are not allowed to sell any type of encryption that the CIA can't decrypt

There are many types of encryption that are in use which no one can decrypt (at least in reasonable time - not billions of years) unless they have a key.

Like one time pad:
One-time pad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Pavelov

This politics section sucks. Most are brainwashed ex-Soviets and then the rest are westernized brain dead zombies.

How is it off topic? It is a thread that is or became political in nature. It seems every political thread is dominated by left-leaning ppl that express almost the same rhetoric or position.

I noticed a thread far back of the 'politics test' and it does show results on the left. Also, many Soviet apologists post here. Yet my post is considered 'off-topic?' Really? Thanks for the smile. :-/