SPEAKER_1: From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.
SPEAKER_1: It was Moscow in May.
SPEAKER_1: The lilacs were blooming, cafes spilled out onto the sidewalks, and the spring was in the air.
SPEAKER_1: But if you listened closely, there was another sound.
SPEAKER_1: The grind of tank treads on pavement, boots pounding as soldiers goose-stepped across Red Square, and the blare of military music echoing off the cobblestones.
SPEAKER_1: It's all part of the annual Moscow parade, marking victory over Nazi Germany.
SPEAKER_1: But this year, as the cheers swelled, another sound faded away.
SPEAKER_1: Phones stopped connecting, ride-share apps froze, maps refused to load, all because the mobile internet in Moscow just vanished.
SPEAKER_1: This wasn't a glitch.
SPEAKER_1: It was a plan.
SPEAKER_2: When the Kremlin was preparing for the May 9th Victory Day Parade, that was when mass outages of internet really became widespread.
SPEAKER_1: This is Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russian analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.
SPEAKER_2: And the Kremlin line was, we're doing this to protect you, because Ukrainians are going to use this as an opportunity to strike major Russian cities.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, internet outages happen everywhere.
SPEAKER_1: Construction crews cut lines, storms knock out towers.
SPEAKER_1: It's usually mundane, forgettable even.
SPEAKER_1: But Kateryna says this was different.
SPEAKER_2: I instinctually already had a feeling that the Kremlin is trying to accomplish something.
SPEAKER_1: Something Putin has been working toward for decades, fixing what he considers to be one of his biggest mistakes.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence.
SPEAKER_1: We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world.
SPEAKER_1: And today, Putin's other war, the one he's been quietly waging for years.
SPEAKER_1: Because for all the control he exerts over Russia, his grip on the Russian Internet has always been surprisingly weak.
SPEAKER_1: Somehow it grew up to be independent and unruly, almost like a digital Wild West.
SPEAKER_1: And for an authoritarian in the 21st century, that's dangerous.
SPEAKER_1: But the war in Ukraine has given him the perfect cover to change that.
SPEAKER_1: And what Putin is building now could be a blueprint for strongmen everywhere.
SPEAKER_2: The Kremlin is re-establishing the curtain, the Iron Curtain.
SPEAKER_1: Only this time it's not concrete and barbed wire, it's code.
SPEAKER_1: Stay with us.
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SPEAKER_1: From Recorded Future News, this is Click Here.
SPEAKER_1: That parade in May, seated beside Putin, was his guest of honor, Chinese president Xi Jinping.
SPEAKER_1: Two world leaders, two autocrats, but two men with very different digital worlds.
SPEAKER_1: In China, the Communist Party recognized the internet's power early, and they took control from the ground up.
SPEAKER_1: The Chinese government built, runs, and owns all of the infrastructure.
SPEAKER_1: People call it the great firewall.
SPEAKER_1: And if you're online in China, every site you visit, every app you open, every email you write runs through government checkpoints.
SPEAKER_1: In China's WeChat, it isn't just a messaging app, it's the bloodstream of daily life.
SPEAKER_1: You pay your bills on it, you hail a cab, you book a doctor's appointment, you chat with your mom.
SPEAKER_1: It's banking, shopping, social life, all in one place.
SPEAKER_1: And every corner of it is carefully monitored.
SPEAKER_1: But in Russia, very different.
SPEAKER_1: Kateryna Stepanenko again.
SPEAKER_2: They're not like China in that way, because the Chinese had imposed strict firewalls and strict regulations earlier on in the Internet's time.
SPEAKER_1: When he took office more than 20 years ago, Putin was focused more on old school technology.
SPEAKER_2: One of the first things that the Kremlin done when Putin came to power was take control over all of the federal TV channels.
SPEAKER_2: But the Kremlin did not control the Internet.
SPEAKER_2: The Internet was kind of a wild west in Russia.
SPEAKER_1: For years, Russians freely wandered the internet.
SPEAKER_1: They scrolled YouTube, TikTok, Facebook.
SPEAKER_1: They debated politics openly.
SPEAKER_1: They read Western news.
SPEAKER_1: Surfing the web in Moscow could feel surprisingly like surfing the web in Missoula.
SPEAKER_1: Putin assumed controlling TV was enough.
SPEAKER_2: I think the main reason is because Putin likely assessed that his control over federal TV channels, online media, various newspaper outlets was sufficient to control the Russian society.
SPEAKER_2: And for a long period of time, it actually seemed like that.
SPEAKER_1: Until the war in Ukraine.
SPEAKER_1: That's when the internet stopped being background music and started becoming a genuine threat.
SPEAKER_1: And two men in particular showed Putin how dangerously it could be wielded.
SPEAKER_1: First, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader of the Wagner group, once Putin's ally, until he discovered the power of telegram.
SPEAKER_1: Putin thought controlling television would be enough, that if he owned the airwaves, then he owned the story.
SPEAKER_1: But the war slipped its leash.
SPEAKER_1: It moved online, into feeds, the encrypted chats, the hashtags.
SPEAKER_1: Prigozhin started posting battlefield rants and raw, unfiltered videos from the front lines.
SPEAKER_5: We are harming ISIS, al-Qaeda and other bandits.
SPEAKER_1: Well, Putin's anchors droned on in prime time.
SPEAKER_1: Suddenly, the Russian president was trying to fight a 21st century information war with the equivalent of a musket.
SPEAKER_1: And then, in June 2023, Prigozhin turned that digital following against Moscow itself.
SPEAKER_2: He had led his mutiny and used the internet to rile up, you know, Wagner forces, as well as Russian servicemen, to go against the Russian Ministry of Defense.
SPEAKER_1: A mercenary army rallying in real time, marching toward the capital.
SPEAKER_6: The news still breaking overnight after that military mutiny by Russia's Wagner-route mercenaries.
SPEAKER_6: Those forces were 100...
SPEAKER_1: For the first time in decades, Putin's grip on power looked shaky, undone by one man's mastery of the very networks that Kremlin never managed to tame.
SPEAKER_1: Two months later, a plane carrying Purgosian fell from the sky.
SPEAKER_1: Russian officials called it an accident.
SPEAKER_1: But almost no one believed that.
SPEAKER_7: Caught on camera, the final seconds of a private jet.
SPEAKER_7: Onboard, reportedly, the head of the Wagner mercenary group.
SPEAKER_1: Then there was Alexei Navalny.
SPEAKER_1: The closest thing Russia had to a real opposition leader.
SPEAKER_1: He was barred from national television, and Putin wouldn't even say his name.
SPEAKER_1: Like a calculated silence meant to diminish him.
SPEAKER_1: So Navalny built his movement somewhere Putin couldn't control.
SPEAKER_8: Online.
SPEAKER_1: He posted slick investigations exposing Kremlin corruption.
SPEAKER_1: He live streamed rallies.
SPEAKER_1: He used his followers to flood the streets.
SPEAKER_1: And for a while, it actually worked.
SPEAKER_1: Millions subscribed to his YouTube channel.
SPEAKER_1: Thousands risked arrest to join protests.
SPEAKER_1: And Vladimir Putin faced a real political threat.
SPEAKER_1: Until the poison, the prison, and finally the silence.
SPEAKER_1: Navalny died in a Russian prison last year.
SPEAKER_1: His death sent shockwaves through Russia and the online communities that had carried his voice.
SPEAKER_1: Pergosian and Navalny, different men, different movements, but both exposed the same truth, that Russia's internet was too open, too unruly, too dangerous for Putin to ignore.
SPEAKER_2: In 2022, the Kremlin, when it first decided to invade Ukraine, to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it actually didn't secure the information space sufficiently enough to sustain a protracted war.
SPEAKER_2: There was a lot of criticism that was emerging on Russian Telegram channels, on various different platforms, and it actually...
SPEAKER_1: So Putin made the internet his new battlefield.
SPEAKER_2: So what the Kremlin has been doing since at least mid-of-2023 is trying to alleviate all of the areas in which similar criticism can emerge.
SPEAKER_1: But here's the problem.
SPEAKER_1: It was a battlefield Putin had allowed to grow wild for more than two decades.
SPEAKER_1: And clawing it back wouldn't be easy.
SPEAKER_1: That's next.
SPEAKER_1: Stay with us.
SPEAKER_8: There's a lot going on right now.
SPEAKER_8: Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air.
SPEAKER_8: I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On The Media.
SPEAKER_8: Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here, and maybe how to head them off at the pass?
SPEAKER_8: That's On The Media's specialty.
SPEAKER_8: Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_1: Soon after the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin realized to keep the war going, it had to seal off the cracks where opposition could grow.
SPEAKER_2: The Kremlin is realizing that, you know, in order for it to sustain itself, grow its military, and actually pursue its imperialist objectives, it actually needs to restrict all ways in which civil society can emerge.
SPEAKER_1: Still, he couldn't just pull the plug.
SPEAKER_1: Russians had grown used to their digital freedoms.
SPEAKER_1: Take them away too suddenly, and he risked not just panic, but rebellion.
SPEAKER_2: Putin could have, of course, just immediately shut down internet, but he needed to play a card in which he wouldn't raise panic in his society.
SPEAKER_1: And then he found it, not in propaganda, not in censorship, but in something more menacing — drones.
SPEAKER_9: Tonight, President Zelensky said his forces used 117 drones in strikes on Russian air bases from…
SPEAKER_1: Governments often reach for national security to justify curbing freedoms.
SPEAKER_1: Even the United States did it after 9-11 with the Patriot Act.
SPEAKER_1: President Trump is doing that now with his deportation regime.
SPEAKER_1: Putin claimed drones relied on mobile networks.
SPEAKER_1: So to protect Russia, he said, those networks sometimes had to go dark.
SPEAKER_1: The truth is, many drones don't need mobile signals at all.
SPEAKER_1: The threat, Kateryna says, was never really about drones.
SPEAKER_1: It was about teaching the Russians that the state giveth and the state can take it away.
SPEAKER_1: Since May, mobile internet service in Russia has gone dark more than 2,000 times.
SPEAKER_1: And these aren't just momentary inconveniences.
SPEAKER_1: When the signal drops, people can't make online payments, or withdraw cash for certain ATMs, or even pull up a map.
SPEAKER_1: The digital rights group AXSnow says they've heard anecdotally about people taking a bus to the nearest town just to find an ATM that worked, just to buy groceries.
SPEAKER_10: Due to the outages, I cannot transmit data or stay connected to the internet, which I need for work.
SPEAKER_1: This is a Russian blogger named Daniel.
SPEAKER_1: We had his responses translated and then recorded into English.
SPEAKER_10: Taxis are more expensive than usual because drivers have to stand by Wi-Fi to accept orders.
SPEAKER_10: Mobile banking doesn't work without the internet.
SPEAKER_10: How long will it last?
SPEAKER_10: What will happen next?
SPEAKER_1: But the outages?
SPEAKER_1: They're just the opening salvo.
SPEAKER_1: Putin is taking a page from China's great firewall.
SPEAKER_1: Across Russia, the government has been quietly swiping out the pipes of the internet, installing its own routers.
SPEAKER_1: They pitch them as more stable, a fix for all those pesky blackouts.
SPEAKER_1: But that stability comes at a price.
SPEAKER_1: Once you're on those routers, you're on the Kremlin's network.
SPEAKER_1: They can see what you see and decide what you don't.
SPEAKER_1: And that's only the beginning.
SPEAKER_1: Soon, the Kremlin will roll out its own messaging app, Max, a kind of Russian WeChat.
SPEAKER_1: But it's not just an app for chatting.
SPEAKER_1: It's a digital ecosystem.
SPEAKER_1: And another way to keep the Russian internet Russian.
SPEAKER_1: Max will come pre-installed on every new phone.
SPEAKER_1: And behind the scenes, Moscow is training its own proprietary AI.
SPEAKER_1: One that, as Kateryna puts it, doesn't answer questions as much as recite ideology.
SPEAKER_1: Meanwhile, the list of things Russians can't access keeps growing.
SPEAKER_1: A senior Russian official has floated the idea of blocking Google Meet, calling Western apps a national security threat.
SPEAKER_1: And just weeks ago, lawmakers passed a bill making it a crime to even search for information they deem extremist.
SPEAKER_2: So it's kind of creating a boogie man out of the Internet.
SPEAKER_1: Some Russians have found themselves in the crosshairs of these new restrictions.
SPEAKER_11: Well, these are mostly people that have anti-war proposition or protest that posted something online.
SPEAKER_11: And yeah, now you understand that you can get up to 15 years for the words online.
SPEAKER_1: This is Sarkis Darbinyan.
SPEAKER_1: He's a cybersecurity lawyer, and he's been representing people caught in the new crosshairs.
SPEAKER_1: His organization, Roskom's Voboda, has been pushing back on these new laws, like the one banning ads for VPNs.
SPEAKER_1: Tens of millions of Russians use VPNs, and it's likely more will want to as the new bans go into place.
SPEAKER_11: There is a very high demand for VPNs among Russian Internet users because Russians really are not like Chinese people.
SPEAKER_11: And for many, many years, for the decades, they were living with all these services.
SPEAKER_11: They were living with Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp.
SPEAKER_11: And of course, they do not want to leave these services that they consider to be very convenient.
SPEAKER_1: Once tolerated by the Kremlin, his group is now branded a foreign agent.
SPEAKER_1: So, Sarkis lives in Portugal now, in exile.
SPEAKER_1: And from there, he and his colleagues are smuggling digital lifelines back into Russia.
SPEAKER_1: Their own VPNs, mirrors, and workarounds.
SPEAKER_1: The kinds of tools ordinary Russians increasingly need just to stay connected.
SPEAKER_11: We use different mirrors and magic links.
SPEAKER_11: We still use Google domain because it's not being blocked yet, where we have our site VPN, and now we have the duplicates of our applications in the market with other names that cannot be so easily detected by the censor.
SPEAKER_1: Vasarkis knows it's an uphill battle, though it's a battle Putin has to fight very carefully.
SPEAKER_1: He's limiting internet freedom without inciting rebellion from his people, who've grown accustomed to a free internet.
SPEAKER_1: Has it worked?
SPEAKER_1: We asked Anil, the blogger you heard earlier, what he was seeing on the ground.
SPEAKER_1: And he says people in his region are largely split.
SPEAKER_1: Half the people he knows are angry.
SPEAKER_1: The other half accepts the government's narrative.
SPEAKER_1: We also spoke with a man named Denis, who works in IT and lives east of Moscow.
SPEAKER_1: At first, he says the outages rattled him.
SPEAKER_12: When we started experiencing issues, like occasional internet shutdowns and the blocking of certain apps, it definitely had an impact at first.
SPEAKER_12: My first reaction was, wait, what?
SPEAKER_12: What do we do now?
SPEAKER_12: But over time, we found some workarounds.
SPEAKER_1: Now he knows which cafes have reliable Wi-Fi when he needs to order a taxi.
SPEAKER_1: And he says he half believes the government's explanation for taking mobile Internet down.
SPEAKER_12: These outages must have something to do with security.
SPEAKER_12: I guess it has to do with jamming systems, apparatuses that are put in place to just prevent drones from flying around and blowing something up.
SPEAKER_12: I guess it's something like that.
SPEAKER_1: But not everyone buys it.
SPEAKER_1: Ours is a college student in the same region, along the Volga River.
SPEAKER_1: We asked him about Russia's new Internet-controlled messaging app, Max.
SPEAKER_5: The new Max app?
SPEAKER_5: I think that's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_5: Actually, ridiculous isn't even the right word.
SPEAKER_5: It's completely pointless and stupid.
SPEAKER_5: Nobody needs it.
SPEAKER_5: It's actually a copy of Telegram, which is already a perfect messenger, just with some extra features no one asked for all once.
SPEAKER_1: It's easy to hear that kind of frustration as defiance.
SPEAKER_1: But Kateryna says it's something else.
SPEAKER_1: The quiet acceptance that in Russia, the government is winning this fight.
SPEAKER_2: So when we first saw that the Kremlin was successful at doing, you know, in limiting a mobile internet in so many different cities, and there was no significant backlash, my first thought was, wow, the Kremlin was actually successful at this.
SPEAKER_2: Russian people are actually going to collaborate and accept some of the policy changes that might be harmful to them and their freedoms.
SPEAKER_1: For her, the story isn't about a clunky new app, it's about what it signals, a country closing in on itself.
SPEAKER_2: The Russians are re-establishing a police state, a Soviet-style curtain, iron-curtain-style police state that is inherently anti-West, inherently anti-US, anti-NATO, that is imperialist to its core, and is going to be a lot more closed off than what it was.
SPEAKER_2: The Russians are trying to find all of the different holes in their information space and really centralize control.
SPEAKER_1: So a new Cold War.
SPEAKER_2: Essentially.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, it could be more than just Cold War, given Russian ambitions in the Baltics.
SPEAKER_1: And she warned, this isn't just about Putin.
SPEAKER_1: It goes far beyond that.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know to what extent we are realizing that the implications of this is not just under Putin regime.
SPEAKER_2: It's also establishing grounds for Putin's successors to come in to a more centralized society and continuing this imperialist objective.
SPEAKER_1: A new iron curtain, not across Europe this time, but across the web.
SPEAKER_1: But more than an iron curtain, it's also a blueprint, a path for aspiring autocrats to follow, a method to slowly limit internet freedom without stoking citizen's ir, until that iron curtain extends far beyond Russia.
SPEAKER_1: Because in a world where autocracy is on the rise, if freedom is contagious, then limiting it is too.
SPEAKER_1: And what Putin is building in Moscow is unlikely to stay in Moscow.
SPEAKER_1: This is Click Here.
SPEAKER_13: If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News.
SPEAKER_13: It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world.
SPEAKER_13: Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
SPEAKER_1: Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories from the past week.
SPEAKER_1: It's Tuesday, September 2nd.
SPEAKER_1: Salt Typhoon is back.
SPEAKER_1: And this time, the head of the FBI's cyber division, Brett Leatherman, is calling for global cooperation.
SPEAKER_14: Beijing's indiscriminate targeting of private communications demands our stronger collaboration.
SPEAKER_1: Last year, Salt Typhoon rather infamously infiltrated nine US telecom companies, tracking who was calling whom and even identifying suspected spies.
SPEAKER_1: Now, investigators say the group has expanded its reach, hitting some 200 American organizations and 80 countries around the globe.
SPEAKER_1: The hackers are reportedly burrowing into company routers, pulling out sensitive network traffic and, in some cases, lying in wait.
SPEAKER_1: Leatherman says they could strike again really soon.
SPEAKER_15: You may be one of more than 300 million Americans with a new worry, a very real threat of identity theft.
SPEAKER_1: A whistleblower is warning that the Social Security Administration, an agency that holds some of our most sensitive information, has been playing fast and loose with data security.
SPEAKER_1: Full names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers.
SPEAKER_1: A whistleblower says Doge, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, copied it all and then uploaded it into a private cloud server, bypassing basic security protocols and creating what he called enormous vulnerabilities with catastrophic potential.
SPEAKER_1: There's no evidence that the data has been breached, yet.
SPEAKER_1: But millions of Americans could now be one attack from having their identities or even their benefits stolen.
SPEAKER_1: Ransomware gangs have found a new target, the cloud.
SPEAKER_1: Microsoft says a hacker group known as Storm 0501 recently infiltrated a large company, not only stealing sensitive data, but trying to delete backups all from the cloud.
SPEAKER_1: And in a twist, they used Microsoft Teams to deliver their ransom note.
SPEAKER_16: Washington and Tokyo remain united in their joint efforts to counter the activist activities of North Korea's IT workers.
SPEAKER_1: The US., Japan and South Korea have pledged to crack down on North Korea's shadow network of IT workers.
SPEAKER_1: These operatives hide behind fake identities, using AI tools to secure remote jobs, often in blockchain or other tech sectors.
SPEAKER_1: They funnel their earnings back to Pyongyang, and in some cases, help stage cyber attacks and steal sensitive data.
SPEAKER_1: Just this month, the US sanctioned three North Korean officials tied to the scheme, and an Arizona woman was sentenced to eight years in prison for helping North Koreans pose as U.S.-based tech workers.
SPEAKER_1: And finally, the popular image hosting platform Imgur is in full-on revolt.
SPEAKER_4: Imgur was purchased by a company called Media Lab AI.
SPEAKER_4: They buy digital brands, they buy sites like Imgur, they fire everyone and then replace them with AI.
SPEAKER_1: Since its 2021 acquisition, users say the platform has deteriorated.
SPEAKER_1: Uploads fail, notifications glitch, and AI moderation has led to some overzealous bans.
SPEAKER_4: A lot of LGBT content was just getting banned as being sexually explicit.
SPEAKER_1: Now protests are flooding the homepage.
SPEAKER_4: The Imgur right now is in full-on rebellion.
SPEAKER_1: For now, the site that built its reputation on memes and in-jokes is turning those same tools on its new owners in what feels less like a protest and more like a digital mutiny.
SPEAKER_14: Today's episode was written and produced by Dina Temple-Raston, Megan Detry, Zach Hirsch, Erica Gaida, and me, Sean Powers.
SPEAKER_14: I was the lead producer.
SPEAKER_14: The episode was edited by Karen Duffin, fact-checked by Darren Ancrum, and contains original music by Ben Levingston with some other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
SPEAKER_14: Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, and our illustrator is Megan Gough.
SPEAKER_14: Jesse Niswanger and Jake Cook are our sound designers and engineers.
SPEAKER_14: Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX.
SPEAKER_14: Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week.
SPEAKER_14: We'll see you then.
SPEAKER_13: Looking for more of the cyber security and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here?
SPEAKER_13: Then check out our sister publication, The Record, from Recorded Future News.
SPEAKER_13: You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others.
SPEAKER_13: And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month.
SPEAKER_13: Just go to TheRecord.media.