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Police guard the front of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin where at least one gunman fired upon people at a service August, 5, 2012 in Oak Creek, Wis. Six people were killed when a shooter, who was later shot dead by a police officer, opened fire on congregants in the Milwaukee suburb. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

Police guard the front of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin where at least one gunman fired upon people at a service August, 5, 2012 in Oak Creek, Wis. Six people were killed when a shooter, who was later shot dead by a police officer, opened fire on congregants in the Milwaukee suburb.

But for a notebook, it could have turned out very differently.

They were supposed to be at the Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, but Pardeep Singh Kaleka's daughter had made them turn back around.

"It was only because my daughter had forgot a notebook at the house," Kaleka says, "that we were not inside the temple at the time."

They were still 10 minutes away when a white supremacist walked into the Oak Creek, Wisc., Sikh temple and opened fire, shooting 10 people, killing six seven if you count Baba Punjab Singh who was partially paralyzed and died from the wound in 2020.

Then he turned the gun on himself.

Pardeep Singh Kaleka poses for a portrait in the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis., on June 1, 2019. At left is a bullet hole in a door frame of the temple, left as a reminder of the 2012 shooting. Morry Gash/AP hide caption

Pardeep Singh Kaleka poses for a portrait in the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis., on June 1, 2019. At left is a bullet hole in a door frame of the temple, left as a reminder of the 2012 shooting.

This weekend, Kaleka and other survivors are marking the 10th anniversary of the Oak Creek massacre. At the time, it was the deadliest hate crime in a place of worship in the United States.

Kaleka's father, Satwant Singh Kaleka was the Gurdwara's founder. He was killed that day.

"My mom was able to survive by hiding in a closet with other women that were there," Kaleka says.

Kaleka thinks a lot about what it means to survive hate, 10 years later. He says this anniversary feels like neither a beginning nor an ending, instead it feels like the middle.

"A lot has been done," he says. But there is still so much to do.

Members of the Sikh community along with other mourners attend a candlelight vigil at the Sikh Religious Society of Wisconsin for the victims of the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin the previous day, on Aug, 6, 2012 in Brookfield, Wis. Wade Michael Page opened fire with a 9mm pistol at the Sikh Temple, killing six people before being killed by police in a shootout. Darren Hauck/Getty Images hide caption

Members of the Sikh community along with other mourners attend a candlelight vigil at the Sikh Religious Society of Wisconsin for the victims of the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin the previous day, on Aug, 6, 2012 in Brookfield, Wis. Wade Michael Page opened fire with a 9mm pistol at the Sikh Temple, killing six people before being killed by police in a shootout.

Since Oak Creek, there have been at least 8 other mass shootings by white supremacists:

Isla Vista, Calif.; Charleston, S.C.; Roseburg, Ore.; Parkland, Fla.; Santa Fe, Texas; Pittsburg, Pa.; El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y.

"I think so much about how understanding racism and white supremacy is such an academic exercise for lots of Americans," Kaleka says. "And for other people it's a lived experience."

In 1907, the white workers of Bellingham, Wash., viciously rounded up all the South Asians mostly Sikhs who had come for jobs in the city's lumber mills. They were driven to the edge of town, put in jail, beaten and forced to flee. Within 10 days the entire South Asian population was, as the local paper at the time reportedly put it, "wiped off the map."

In New Jersey in the late 1980s a gang that called themselves the "dot busters" in a letter to their newspaper took responsibility for a spate of attacks on Indians that lasted several years, cloaking the community in dread. At least one man was killed, another left in a coma.

That was all before 9/11 which transformed what it meant to be South Asian American, and in a sense created a new racial category being "brown" or "Muslim-looking."

White Americans may remember the days after 9/11 as a time of mourning, shock and fear that international terrorists were coming from outside to attack the United States. For many South Asian and Muslim Americans, that fear combined with a threat coming from inside the nation blame, racist abuse, hate, and violence from fellow Americans.

"In those horrific first few weeks we kept thinking OK, it's going to stop," says Deepa Iyer.

Iyer was the head of the advocacy organization SAALT South Asian Americans Leading Together during 9/11 and Oak Creek.

"We'll send the right messages out, and get media to cover it, and get the president to say something and it'll stop," she says.

But it did not stop. The first deadly hate crime in the aftermath of 9/11 was the slaying of a turbaned Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, in Mesa Ariz., shot dead while he was planting flowers outside the gas station he owned.

Iyer says what made the hate and violence that followed the attacks on the Twin Towers different was that it paralleled the targeting of Muslims and South Asians by government policies and law enforcement.

"The idea that South Asians are a national security threat, I don't know that that has ever gone away," she says.

"And then it led to what happened on August 5th, 2012."

When Oak Creek happened, "the Sikh community had already been warning about xenophobia translating into violence for a decade," says Nikki Singh.

Singh is senior policy and advocacy manager at the Sikh Coalition, an advocacy group for Sikhs in the United States that was founded the night of 9/11. They weren't alone those warnings also came from "the Muslim community, from the Arab community, other South Asians, from the Latinx community."

But the government cared more about the idea of South Asians as perpetrators of terrorism, than to see them as its potential victims, both Iyer and Singh say.

"Oak Creek can be seen as kind of a warning sign of the increasingly violent and assertive role that white supremacy was set to play in American society over the next decade," Singh says.

Forty-five days after the massacre, Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother was killed at the Gurdwara, testified before the U.S. Senate.

Harpreet Singh Saini testifies before a Senate Judiciary "Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights" Subcommittee hearing on "Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism" on Sept. 19, 2012. Saini lost his mother at the Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin. Chris Maddaloni/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images hide caption

Harpreet Singh Saini testifies before a Senate Judiciary "Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights" Subcommittee hearing on "Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism" on Sept. 19, 2012. Saini lost his mother at the Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin.

"I came here today to ask the government to give my mother the dignity of being a statistic," he told them, referring to the fact that the FBI did not track hate crimes against Sikhs. "My mother and those shot that day will not even count on a federal form."

"We cannot solve a problem we refuse to even recognize," he testified.

The FBI officially started tracking hate crimes against Sikh's in 2015.

"It took a mass incident like this happening for the government to take it seriously," Nikki Singh says. "To be added as a category."

The data since shows a stark picture.

"Sikhs have been among the top five, if not among the top three, most targeted faith groups for hate crimes, across the United States," she says.

She points out those numbers are rising even as law enforcement agencies have been choosing not to collect and share hate crimes with the federal government.

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the group Stop AAPI Hate has been tracking hate crimes against Asian Americans. Russell Jeung, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and a professor at University of California, San Francisco, says while their data has shone a much-needed light on rising hate crimes against East Asians, all Asian Americans are reporting worrying rates of hate crimes and bias incidents.

Russell Jeung, chairman and professor, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University, and founder of STOP AAPI Hate, displays a Stop AAPI Hate report for Los Angeles County from March 19 through June 3 on his computer on Wednesday, June 17, 2020 in Oakland, Calif. Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images hide caption

Russell Jeung, chairman and professor, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University, and founder of STOP AAPI Hate, displays a Stop AAPI Hate report for Los Angeles County from March 19 through June 3 on his computer on Wednesday, June 17, 2020 in Oakland, Calif.

"South Asians, Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians had higher rates in the past year than East Asians," he says.

Deepa Iyer says that Asian American solidarity, alongside solidarity with Black people and other marginalized communities, has been one a source of deep hope in the past few years.

"There has been a tremendous growth in solidarity, not just in words, but in practice and actions."

Iyer says that solidarity is something the survivors of the massacre have modeled throughout the past decade.

"What I always remember is how the Oak Creek community showed up for others," Iyer says.

They showed up when a white supremacist killed 9 people in 2015 at a Black church in South Carolina, surpassing Oak Creek as the deadliest hate crime in a place of worship.

"They held a vigil that night," Iver said.

A morning view of a memorial outside the Emanuel AME Church June 19, 2015 in Charleston, S. C. Police arrested then-21-year-old, Dylann Roof, suspected of carrying out a gun massacre at one of America's oldest black churches, the latest deadly assault to fuel simmering racial tensions. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A morning view of a memorial outside the Emanuel AME Church June 19, 2015 in Charleston, S. C. Police arrested then-21-year-old, Dylann Roof, suspected of carrying out a gun massacre at one of America's oldest black churches, the latest deadly assault to fuel simmering racial tensions.

They showed solidarity in other ways as well.

After 9/11, many Sikhs were targeted because Americans incorrectly thought they were Muslim. It didn't matter that they were from a completely different faith system, they were still victims of Islamophobia.

Speaking at the hate crimes hearing in 2012, Harpreet Singh Saini talked about not taking an easy out.

"So many people have asked Sikhs to simply blame Muslims for attacks against our community, or just say, 'We're not Muslim,' " he said.

"But we won't blame anyone else. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us."

Instead, Saini asked the government to go after who was really responsible.

"I ask that government pursue domestic terrorists with the same vigor as attacks from abroad," he said at the hearing.

But even years later, the FBI has been slow to classify attacks by white nationalists as domestic terrorism.

That's one reason the Sikh Coalition is asking not just for prayers on the anniversary of Oak Creek, but for action. One of those action items is the passage of The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. The bill passed the House of Representatives, but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate.

Domestic terrorism didn't start with Oak Creek, says Pradeep Singh Kaleka, whose father was killed that day.

"We have to understand the domestic terrorism has always been here," he says.

He points to slavery, massacres of Native Americans, lynchings, and white mob violence like Tulsa's Black Wall Street, or the 1907 Bellingham riots.

"It was used to control so many people and control the society," he says. "And I think that now that it is backfiring and people are saying, well, maybe we need to do something about it."

But nothing can really change, he says, without addressing the root causes.

Arno Michaelis is an American, former far-right extremist and the founder of Life After Hate, an organization that helps deradicalize extremists. Ryan Stuart/Fairfax Media via Getty Images hide caption

Arno Michaelis is an American, former far-right extremist and the founder of Life After Hate, an organization that helps deradicalize extremists.

Which is why a few months after his father was killed, Kaleka found himself across the table from a tall, tattooed, white man. Not just any white man, but a former skinhead and founder of one of the largest white supremacist organization in the country at the time, Arno Michaelis, a man who used to commit violent acts in the name of white power.

The meeting was at a Thai restaurant on the East side of Milwaukee, which oddly enough put Kaleka at ease.

"White people can barely handle spicy food," he says, laughing. "So he must not be a racist anymore."

That meeting would lead to a long-term friendship.

Kaleka made it his mission to confront white supremacist violence, partnering with Michaelis to teach young people to undo racism. Kaleka is now a deradicalization expert, sometimes working directly with white supremacists.

"A lot of my clients who were people of color would have trauma-related disorders," he says. But it was different with white clients. "People who were white would have anxiety-related disorders."

Kaleka knows that trauma can be generational, inherited from our histories.

"So can anxiety," he says. "I see that white society right now is so just embroiled in a sense of fear and lots of times it's normalized."

To Kaleka, it's all connected the push for guns, the idea that there should only be one religion, that "someone says, 'I'm the only one who has this landline to god,' " neighborhoods segregated out of a false sense of safety.

"It's such a fear-based mindset," he says.

Kaleka says it's about trying to capture and hold onto power, but a perverted power.

"They think power over somebody is actual power," he says.

While the Oak Creek community gathers for a vigil Friday night to mark the anniversary, Donald Trump will be holding a rally about 20 minutes away in Waukesha. That is the site of a mass killing last November that the Anti Defamation League says has been exploited by white supremacists.

"White supremacists have claimed that the incident was an 'anti-White terror attack' and are using it to sow anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies, blaming both Jews and the liberal media for covering up a 'black-on-white attack,' " the ADL writes in a blog post on its website.

"You have to kind of think about why is it that people are choosing these dates and places," says Kaleka.

"These political battle lines have casualties," he says. "And often those casualties are minority and underrepresented communities," something he knows all too well.

Before 2012, Kaleka says he wouldn't have considered himself "super religious or even spiritual." The massacre changed that.

He points to the last line in Sikh scripture, "Nanak naam chardi kala, tere bhaane sarbat da bhala."

"A lot of times we hear the chardi part, which means relentless optimism," he says referring to chardi kala, an oft repeated Sikh phrase that speaks to Sikhism's ability to find positivity, even in the face of great struggle.

But it is the full phrase in its entirety that Kaleka gets most hope from.

"It means we shall bend the moral arc of the universe towards the good for all people."

Photos of the victims of the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin sit in front of the temple during a service held to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting rampage that killed six members of the temple Aug. 5, 2013, in Oak Creek, Wis. The six temple members were killed by white supremacist Michael Page, who later killed himself. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

Photos of the victims of the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin sit in front of the temple during a service held to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting rampage that killed six members of the temple Aug. 5, 2013, in Oak Creek, Wis. The six temple members were killed by white supremacist Michael Page, who later killed himself.

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Hate crimes against South Asians and Sikhs are on the rise - NPR

New York would require people applying for a handgun license to turn over a list of social media accounts so officials could verify their character and conduct under a bill being considered by the state legislature.

The provision was part of a proposed redesign of firearms licensing laws hammered out by lawmakers after the US supreme court struck down rules severely limiting who could get a permit to carry a handgun outside their home.

A bill advanced by Democrats would eliminate the most strict barriers to getting a permit but also impose new requirements for applicants.

Applicants would have to show they have the essential character, temperament and judgement necessary to be entrusted with a weapon and to use it only in a manner that does not endanger oneself and others, according to the bill.

As part of that assessment of good character, the bill says, the applicant has to turn over a list of any social media accounts they have had in the past three years to confirm the information regarding the applicants character and conduct.

Applicants would also have to provide four character references, take 16 hours of firearms safety training plus two hours of practice at a range, undergo periodic background checks and turn over the contact information of their spouse, domestic partner or any other adults living in their household.

The bill does not specify whether applicants would be required to provide licensing officers with access to private social media accounts not visible to the general public.

The idea that the state would let licensing officials review an applicants speech as a condition of getting a license infuriated gun rights advocates.

This is the kind of bill that the Gestapo would be proud of. This is the kind of bill youd see in communist China, said Aaron Dorr, executive director of the New York State Firearms Association. This will never survive a court challenge. This is the kind of concept that would pass in those countries.

The Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, released the text of the legislation early on Friday as the legislature continued a special session.

The supreme court struck down a previous rule requiring people to demonstrate an unusual threat to their safety to get a license to carry a handgun outside their homes.

That restriction generally limited the licenses to people who had worked in law enforcement or had another special need that went beyond routine public safety concerns.

Under the new system, the state would not authorize permits for people with criminal convictions within five years for driving while intoxicated, menacing or third-degree assault. People also wouldnt be allowed to carry firearms at a long list of sensitive places, including Times Square in New York City.

That list also includes schools, universities, government buildings, places where people have gathered for public protests, healthcare facilities, places of worship, libraries, public playgrounds and parks, daycare centers, summer camps, addiction and mental health centers, shelters, public transit, bars, theaters, stadiums, museums, polling places and casinos.

New York would also bar people from bringing guns into any business or workplace unless the owners put up signage saying guns were welcome. People who bring guns into places without such a sign could be prosecuted on felony charges.

In many other states businesses that want to keep guns out are required to post signs indicating weapons are not allowed.

Gun advocates said the bill infringes on rights upheld by the supreme court.

Now were going to let the pizzeria owner decide whether or not I can express my constitutional right, said Andrew Lanza, a state senator and Staten Island Republican.

This is a disgrace. See you in the courts. You all know this is unconstitutional. You all know this is just a ruse. Another attempt to say to the people of the state of New York: We dont trust you.

The bill would also fix a recently passed law that barred sales of some types of bullet-resistant vests to the general public but inadvertently left out many types of body armor, including the type worn by a gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket.

Democrats with supermajorities in both legislative chambers expected to pass the bill later on Friday. The bill would then get sent to Hochuls desk for her expected signature, then take effect on 1 September.

More here:
New York bill would force gun owners to reveal social media to obtain license - The Guardian US

Throughout his tenure, Jeff Kennett used the local tabloid as his preferred outlet, maintained a feud against ABC News & Current Affairs on both radio and TV and regularly criticising The Age, all while maintaining a cosy relationship with 3AW. Remember the image of the then premier shovelling sand at the media pack, only half in jest?

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Andrews refusal to be schooled by the tabloid editors is reminiscent of Malcolm Turnbulls fabulous retort to the not-missed-at-all Sydney shock-jock Alan Jones, when the then PM retorted, I will not to take dictation from you as the puffed-up breakfast radio host tried to tell Turnbull what he had to do. Almost nobody remembers the issue they were squabbling about but the attempt by the prime minister to remind Jones of his rightful place in the universe is unforgettable.

Andrews staff now regard themselves as their own publisher. He preferences Twitter for major announcements but also uses Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

He is the most prolific and consistent user of social media in Australian politics with a sizeable team devoted to creating fresh content throughout the day as well as monitoring public reactions. On Twitter alone he has 10 times more followers than his NSW counterpart 419,000 to Dominic Perrottets 41,000. No other state premier relies on tweets as much Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland is closest with half as many followers as Andrews.

In all of Australian politics, only the new Prime Minister has a bigger Twitter base, but he is not as active as Andrews. Anthony Albanese has just over 500,000 Twitter disciples, Penny Wong 390,000. Peter Dutton attracts a mere 130,000. Tellingly, Matthew Guy, the Victorian Opposition Leader, has just 28,000 followers on Twitter and still relies on legacy media to try to get traction.

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Twitter is just one tool in the Andrews social media armoury, but the platform is obsessively watched in political circles and can be highly effective. It can be toxic and a risk to peoples mental health, but is a platform where the creator retains total control over content no pesky gotcha questions or tricky traps set by ambitious journalists. Andrews has invested heavily in creating an expert team of social media specialists to milk every opportunity.

The Premier cannot be accused of being shy of an old-fashioned all in press conference as we saw with the Daily Dan marathons with the press pack throughout Victorias extended lockdowns. But being seen to be in charge during a prolonged emergency is entirely different to massaging the message during an election campaign, where control of every component is vital.

When Andrews returned from his extended rehabilitation after a serious back injury, he addressed Victorians directly, his team filming him talking to their camera, sitting on a couch at home with his wife, Catherine. They knew that all media would re-report his spiel. By speaking directly to the voters through social media, he avoided being edited and was not critiqued for playing favourites with any individual media outlet.

The AFL has long adopted a similar strategy. The league and the clubs are thought to now employ more football journalists than independent media combined. They generate their own stories, their own interviews, their own stunts. They protect their brand by limiting the opportunities for external scrutiny.

Politics and professional sport have much in common.

Excerpt from:
In bypassing the media, Daniel Andrews controls the message - The Age

On the heels of the NATO summit, Turkey has cut access to broadcasters Deutsche Welle and Voice of America in a move that could spark tensions with its Western allies.

An Ankara court on Thursday night ordered the blocking of the websites of the Turkish-language version of German and American public broadcasters Deutsche Welle (DW) and Voice of America (VoA) as a penalty for not applying for licenses under the countrys media regulation.

Access to DW Turkish and Voice of America, which did not apply for a license, was blocked by the Ankara Criminal Judgeship of Peace upon the request of the RTK Presidency, said lhan Tac, a board member of the controversial Turkish media regulator RTK, on Twitter.

Here is freedom of the press and advanced democracy!

A few days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan agreed to align his views with his NATO allies' by lifting his country's objections to the candidacy of Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance, the conservative leader risks stern words from his democratic partners over his renewed crackdown on freedom of expression.

DW and VoA refused to apply for licenses in February over concerns about undue government interference. DW argued that "licensing would have allowed the Turkish government to censor editorial content. A 2019 law grants RTK more control over the online content and websites of media organizations.

RTK is dominated by Erdoan's conservative AKP party and allies, and it regularly sanctions organizations critical of the government.

Turkeys press freedom has particularly deteriorated in the last year and ranks 149th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. Most Turkish media outlets are run by the government or companies closely connected to it, and the international Turkish-language press remains one of the last options to obtain alternative news. Beyond traditional media, Erdoans government has also pushed to increase control over social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Journalists and press organizations widely lambasted the decision. The Progressive Journalists Association (ada Gazeteciler Dernei) described the ruling as "disgraceful" and a sign of the government's "intolerance to objective journalism."

DW said it would challenge the ruling.

More:
Turkey blocks access to two German and US media outlets - POLITICO Europe

Since the start of Russias war on Ukraine in late February 2022, Russian internet users have experienced what has been dubbed the descent of a digital iron curtain.

Russian authorities blocked access to all major opposition news sites, as well as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Under the new draconian laws purporting to combat fake news about the Russian-Ukrainian war, internet users have faced administrative and criminal charges for allegedly spreading online disinformation about Russias actions in Ukraine. Most Western technology companies, from Airbnb to Apple, have stopped or limited their Russian operations as part of the broader corporate exodus from the country.

Many Russians downloaded virtual private network software to try to access blocked sites and services in the first weeks of the war. By late April, 23% of Russian internet users reported using VPNs with varying regularity. The state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has been blocking VPNs to prevent people from bypassing government censorship and stepped up its efforts in June 2022.

Although the speed and scale of the wartime internet crackdown are unprecedented, its legal, technical and rhetorical foundations were put in place during the preceding decade under the banner of digital sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty for nations is the exercise of state power within national borders over digital processes like the flow of online data and content, surveillance and privacy, and the production of digital technologies. Under authoritarian regimes like todays Russia, digital sovereignty often serves as a veil for stymieing domestic dissent.

Russia has advocated upholding state sovereignty over information and telecommunications since the early 1990s. In the aftermath of the Cold War, a weakened Russia could no longer compete with the U.S. economically, technologically or militarily. Instead, Russian leaders sought to curtail the emergent U.S. global dominance and hold on to Russias great power status.

They did so by promoting the preeminence of state sovereignty as a foundational principle of international order. In the 2000s, seeking to project its great power resurgence, Moscow joined forces with Beijing to spearhead the global movement for internet sovereignty.

Despite its decades-long advocacy of digital sovereignty on the world stage, the Kremlin didnt begin enforcing state power over its domestic cyberspace until the early 2010s. From late 2011 to mid-2012, Russia saw the largest series of anti-government rallies in its post-Soviet history to protest Vladimir Putins third presidential run and fraudulent parliamentary elections. As in the anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, the internet served as a critical instrument in organizing and coordinating the Russian protests.

Following Putins return to the presidency in March 2012, the Kremlin turned its attention to controlling Russian cyberspace. The so-called Blacklist Law established a framework for blocking websites under the guise of fighting child pornography, suicide, extremism and other widely acknowledged societal ills.

However, the law has been regularly used to ban sites of opposition activists and media. The law widely known as the Bloggers Law then subjected all websites and social media accounts with over 3,000 daily users to traditional media regulations by requiring them to register with the state.

The next pivotal moment in Moscows embrace of authoritarian digital sovereignty came after Russias invasion of eastern Ukraine in the Spring of 2014. Over the following five years, as Russias relations with the West worsened, the Russian government undertook a barrage of initiatives meant to tighten its control over the countrys increasingly networked public.

The data localization law, for example, required foreign technology companies to keep Russian citizens data on servers located within the country and thus easily accessible to the authorities. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, another law required telecom and internet companies to retain users communications for six months and their metadata for three years and hand them over to authorities upon request without a court order.

The Kremlin has used these and other legal innovations to open criminal cases against thousands of internet users and jail hundreds for liking and sharing social media content critical of the government.

In April 2019, Russian authorities took their aspirations for digital sovereignty to another level with the so-called Sovereign Internet Law. The law opened the door for abuse of individual users and isolation of the internet community as a whole.

The law requires all internet service providers to install state-mandated devices for counteracting threats to stability, security, and the functional integrity of the internet within Russian borders. The Russian government has interpreted threats broadly, including social media content.

For example, the authorities have repeatedly used this law to throttle the performance of Twitter on mobile devices when Twitter has failed to comply with government requests to remove illegal content.

Further, the law establishes protocols for rerouting all internet traffic through Russian territory and for a single command center to manage that traffic. Ironically, the Moscow-based center that now controls traffic and fights foreign circumvention tools, such as the Tor browser, requires Chinese and U.S. hardware and software to function in the absence of their Russian equivalents.

Lastly, the law promises to establish a Russian national Domain Name System. DNS is the global internets core database that translates between web names such as theconversation.com and their internet addresses, in this case 151.101.2.133. DNS is operated by a California-based nonprofit, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

At the time of the laws passing, Putin justified the national DNS by arguing that it would allow the Russian internet segment to function even if ICANN disconnected Russia from the global internet in an act of hostility. In practice, when, days into Russias invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian authorities asked ICANN to disconnect Russia from the DNS, ICANN declined the request. ICANN officials said they wanted to avoid setting the precedent of disconnecting entire countries for political reasons.

The Russian-Ukrainian war has undermined the integrity of the global internet, both by Russias actions and the actions of technology companies in the West. In an unprecedented move, social media platforms have blocked access to Russian state media.

The internet is a global network of networks. Interoperability among these networks is the internets foundational principle. The ideal of a single internet, of course, has always run up against the reality of the worlds cultural and linguistic diversity: Unsurprisingly, most users dont clamor for content from faraway lands in unintelligible languages. Yet, politically motivated restrictions threaten to fragment the internet into increasingly disjointed networks.

Though it may not be fought over on the battlefield, global interconnectivity has become one of the values at stake in the Russian-Ukrainian war. And as Russia has solidified its control over sections of eastern Ukraine, it has moved the digital Iron Curtain to those frontiers.

See the rest here:
Kremlin tightens control over Russians' online lives threatening domestic freedoms and the global internet - The Conversation