Based on participant observation and user studies, this short talk shares insights about surveilllance self-defense and communication tactics of anti-war activists in Russia. It explores current surveillance techniques used by Russian government to identify and persecute anti-war protesters and analyses digital migration patterns of Russian activists towards alternative communication tools.
Since the beginning of Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian society was quickly polarized. The government started to control the discours about war and silence all kinds of alternative narratives and opposition voices. The anti-war movement quickly found itself in deep underground and in high-risk, with more than 10 000 arrests during rallies against the war and hundreds new criminal cases against those who dare to speak out the truth about Russian army atrocities committed in Ukraine.
This talk is based on my own experience as a member of anti-war resistance, and as a Russian girl married to a Ukrainian guy. We have just escaped from Russia to western Europe.
Apart from being an activist, I am involved in the scene of digital security and secure messaging since 2016, working with the team of Delta Chat messenger as a UX-researcher, and studying usage of secure messaging apps in high-risk areas such as Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, Iran and so on. I have recently published a book based on 4 years of fieldwork entitled "Concealing for Freedom. The making of encryption and online civil liberties" that traces recent history of most famous end-to-end encrypted messaging apps and their usages in at-risk areas.
In this talk I would like to describe the current state of Russian surveillance technologies and practices used to prosecute and identify anti-war activists. I will also describe how the war affected Internet governance and Internet censorship in Russia and what are the consequences for the opposition, media and civil society. I will share my analysis of user patterns in terms of digital self defense, namely, growing interest in decentralized, p2p or federated messaging alternatives as opposed to centralized ones.
My talk will be structured not so much as an academic presentation but rather as a set of stories from the field. And I would like to use half of the time for an active discussion with the audience about how to help those who stayed inside Russia and try to oppose the war. What tools and what tactics could we recommend them?