[Discuss] [Fwd: [Backbone] [members-discuss] Russian government blocked 2mln IPs at 16/04/2018]

[Markus Gschwendt]

Weil wir bei der letzten Zukunftsdiskussion über auferlegte Zensur
gesprochen haben, hier ein aktuelles Beispiel einer Hiferuf-eMail, die
über eine RIPE-Liste hereingekommen ist. Das passiert aktuell in .RU:

-------- Forwarded Message --------
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Subject: [Backbone] [members-discuss] Russian government blocked 2mln
IPs at 16/04/2018
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2018 02:16:59 +0300

Good time of day!

I want to bring up discussion about situation in Internet inside Russian
Federation. I find current situation not good for Internet, not good for
RIPE community, for ISPs and for progress itself.

Short background.

Russian government asked Telegram messenger service (like Viber, Watsup,
etc, they can be the next) to give them keys of end-to-end encryption
between users. Telegram refused to give it because it stands for
freedom, constitution rights of people and telegram says it's not
possible to give that keys because they don't have it. At least at
Friday 13 of April 2018 they blocked websites of Telegram and at Monday
16 they blocked all technical networks of Telegram inside Russian
Federation.

This Monday was really nice and fun day when users of the Telegram, the
most popular messenger application in Russia, started to add VPN/Socks
settings to unblock telegram. Telegram users are good in IT and a lot of
people keep telegram online and use it.

What did Russian government (who keeps using Telegram messenger as well)
started to do? Yes, They started to block VPN services that gives free
socks5 proxies and VPNs for telegram users. A lot of such services were
based on Amazon Cloud. So, at the evening RKN (aka Roskonadzor, advisory
of telecom) started to add IPv4 networks in Russian blocklist (= blackhole).

Example of networks that were added to Russian blocklist/blackhole

Amazone
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T17:35:00+03:00">52.58.0.0/15</ipSubnet>
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T17:47:00+03:00">18.196.0.0/15</ipSubnet>
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T17:47:00+03:00">18.194.0.0/15</ipSubnet>
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T19:57:00+03:00">18.184.0.0/15</ipSubnet>
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T17:47:00+03:00">35.156.0.0/14</ipSubnet>

GOOGLE CLOUD
    <ipSubnet ts="2018-04-16T20:21:00+03:00">35.192.0.0/12</ipSubnet>

A lot of businesses were affected even some bank companies, processing
and others who where using Amazon services. Amount of small companies
affected is very large. Big companies? Apple services were affected too
as I found. A lot of application use Amazon cloud.

Just for info. Some time ago Russian gov wanted to integrate blackhole
based on BGP (and that's bring up the question about whole internet
stability). Because they break local internet time to time.

You can track amount of IPs in blocklist monitoring at
https://2018.schors.spb.ru/
A lot of news web sites write about this situation.

Сonclusion.

I don't find this situation suitable for any country. I know and fully
understand that it's not easy to find consensus in discussions of such
things. But I wish and I want community think about such issues.
They should not happen in any country.

We are as RIPE community are responsible for Internet stability and
safety and making this Internet better.

I want RIPE community offer how we should protect normal internet users
of all countries from unintelligent, irrational and very bad behavior of
local authorities. I think it's not good idea to assign any IPs for such
authorities.

Consensus should be found.