Belarus spent three days behind the great Chinese “wall of fire”
Officials in Belarus deny blocking the internet during three days of violent street protests.
The Ministry of Communications and President Lukashenko explain the breakdown in communications by DDOS attacks from abroad.
However, political scientist Alexey Dzermant, close to the presidential administration, admitted: the opposition was deliberately disconnected from social networks and instant messengers.
“The tactic of blocking messengers worked. They calculated well the psychology of Belarusians, especially among the Creaks. These are extreme individualists; without the Internet, they have weak social connections and self-organization. A striking difference from the color revolutions in Arab countries, when the lack of the Internet stimulated people to take to the streets,” Dzermant wrote in his Telegram channel.
He believes that “the Belarusian experience in suppressing the Maidan will be in great demand in the future.”
Russian political scientist Marat Bashirov believes that the experience is not entirely Belarusian. He believes that Alexander Lukashenko actively adopted from China methods of combating not only “coronapsychosis”, but also mass protests, for example in Hong Kong.
“Lukashenko is the world’s first head of a country undergoing a color revolution who switched to his own communication system, depriving his military-political opponents of access to social networks and instant messengers. They say that specialists from China helped him with this. As a result, the population really draws information only from official sources, and the groups of protest moderators were left without communication between themselves (unless they were sitting opposite each other in the kitchen) and foreign coordinators. It is possible to work through embassies, but how to enter them? Outdoors everywhere. It’s interesting only from the point of view of opposition,” Bashirov wrote following the results of the first day of protests.
However, already on Monday, access points to the opposition network were provided either by Western diplomats or by someone else. Because the videos began to actively replenish the Polish Telegram network, which led the protests from Warsaw.
Speaking of Telegram, its owner Pavel Durov took an active part in breaking through the Belarusian version of the Chinese “firewall” (the Internet content filtering system in China, the “Golden Shield” project).
“We have enabled our anti-censorship tools in Belarus to ensure Telegram remains accessible to the majority of users there. However, the connection is still very unstable, since the Internet is sometimes completely turned off in the country,” Durov wrote on his Twitter.
As a result, Telegram worked when all other messengers collapsed, and through it the Polish media controlled the crowd in Minsk. How can we not say thank you to Roskomnadzor, which last year trained the rebellious Durov to overcome barriers.
According to IT specialist Andrei Lankin, they also tried to break through the firewall from Belarus using VPN, traffic masking and gateways based on proxy servers. However, he refused to name all the methods.
“The key problem was restricting access to the external segment of the Internet. Periodically, problems arose with internal traffic exchange. The main participants in this operation are the National Traffic Exchange Center (the equivalent in Russia is the traffic exchange exchange), as well as the Belarusian companies Bikloud and Beltelecom.
There were different methods: blocking by ports, by addresses. Some mobile operators were blocked, and deep packet analysis methods were used, which are used for censoring. This is a completely Chinese scenario,” Lankin said on the Dozhd TV channel.
According to him, many Belarusian IT specialists have already managed to move to Ukraine and Russia during the three days of blocking.
However, there are other opinions. On Tuesday evening, a man who introduced himself as Vladimir Suslov, the owner of a small IT company in Lida, got through to Dozhd. He turned out to be a supporter of Lukashenko and therefore does not condemn the shutdown of the Internet.
“I have no problems with the Internet. We have everything set up. They are most likely jammed here, but I understand why. I was in Kyiv after the Maidan and talked with people there. Everyone was unhappy and did not want this. Therefore, even if our Internet is jammed, I will support this from some side,” Suslov said.
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