Russia: Citizens must turn off home surveillance because Ukrainians are coming

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/russia_memo_ukraine_invasion/

by rntn • 2 years ago

70 52 2 years ago

theregister.com

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Weird. It's as though home security and dating apps are notoriously a privacy nightmare.

okr• 2 years ago

It is more social engineering.

koolala• 2 years ago

Turn off the 1 thing protecting you from war crimes.

dzhiurgis2• 2 years ago

Yes. So nobody sees how Russians are looting their neighbours house.

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

Or run tracking apps.

Russians lost at least one officer to an assassin finding his profile on an running app and lying in wait.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

Similarly I wonder how much of Russia's traffic camera network Ukraine has access to. And conversely what Ukraine does to avoid revealing targets and troop movements to Russian traffic cams

neltnerb4• 2 years ago

Figures that the only push-back against pervasive surveillance that would have any chance of success is when the military points out that it is a threat to national security.

The main thing surveillance cameras create is distrust between neighbors, and to enable businesses to better ignore the community they are in.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

[1] The main thing surveillance cameras create is distrust between neighbors, and [2] to enable businesses to better ignore the community they are in.

I see your first point, but don't get the second. What do you intend?

neltnerb4• 2 years ago

Basically the same, honestly.

Putting one up inside your store, okay, sure whatever. I mean when they put them outside pointing at sidewalks and pedestrians. Monitoring the sidewalk says that you care more about your security than your neighbor's privacy, and intrinsically that you think your neighbors may be a security threat, which is objectively offensive if you're the neighbor.

You don't do that if you see yourself as a part of the neighborhood.

We can talk about theft and security being important concerns, sure, but when I see security cameras going up pointed at neighbors and pedestrians it's yet to be *because of an actual breakin*. It's just bonkers how they get installed without anyone asking "why here, specifically?"

It seems like a response based on paranoia when the less antisocial thing to do is recognize that your business is, by the nature of physical space, part of the community. If every employee, including the founders and C-suite, commute from elsewhere and never talk to anyone living near their office, of course they're going to be paranoid of neighbors.

supriyo-biswas• 2 years ago

The technicalities of such an order greatly interest me — Roskomnadzor already has statutory rules in place that make ISPs block egress traffic to proxies, Tor entry nodes, and similar. Since the censorship infrastructure is already there, couldn’t they similarly not put up stateful firewall rules to prevent any inbound connections from outside Russia?

wood_spirit2• 2 years ago

The Ukrainians probably had covert access into the Russian internet, but now they actually have Russian territory. Perhaps they are on the inside?

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

Lots of Ukrainians live and study in Russia even after the war (I knew a Ukrainian citizen who was studying at PhysTech despite the 2022 war), and lots of families in Russia have relatives in Ukraine (and vice versa).

It makes this war even more tragic, because Ukraine and Russia are so intertwined socially and culturally, and there was no reason for Russia to escalate the war.

That said, Roskomnadzor can't fully lock down ingress and egress without drastically impacting the Russian economy and pissing off your average Russian who watches YouTube, games on Steam, and messages using Telegram.

dzhiurgis2• 2 years ago

Can they use Starlink terminals for this?

As in, connect terminal to some household fiber modem, then get whitelisted by DOD & SpaceX?

I wouldn't be surprised SpaceX already secretly does this tho hence the weird news how they allegedly supplying Starlink to Russian forces.

nikolay• 2 years ago

Of course, a clickbait title.

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

Citizens were additionally asked to avoid posting to social media any footage taken from dashcams or similar equipment

Well, there goes half of Russia's national cultural exports.

api• 2 years ago

The Ukraine invasion is going to go down as one of the biggest own-goals in recent history. Even if Russia took all of Ukraine tomorrow it looks like it'd still be a pyrrhic non-victory given how much it cost them in money, lives, and international standing. It's basically reduced them to a Chinese vassal state.

It's like Putin watched the US experience in Iraq and said "I can do something much dumber than that..."

CamperBob25• 2 years ago

Understand that Kim Jong Un doesn't want to be Putin when he grows up. Instead, it is Putin who envies Kim. He wants to live a life of lucre and luxury while the rest of the world is more-or-less forced to prop up his failed state for humanitarian and political reasons.

As stupid as this sounds, no other explanation for Putin's behavior makes any more sense. Come up with a better one? I'm all ears... but there's a lot you'll need to explain.

layer83• 2 years ago

Putin wants Russia to be great again (the image of Russia he grew up with), and to undo the historic “injustice” of the fall of the USSR and Lenin’s “mistake” of ceding territory to Ukraine.

hakfoo• 2 years ago

The explanation might be simpler.

He still needs to play, in some way, to a domestic audience.

The fall of the USSR was objectively bad for a large part of the Russian population. Their economy and quality-of-life metrics have never really returned to pre-1991 levels. Their geopolitical relevance has been degraded, and Western institutions have nibbled away at their sphere of influence. They've lost millions of square kilometres of territorial holdings that date to Imperial times.

He needs to perform some action to prove he's delivering something, and a stilted "you bait us long enough and we'll bite back" response might well fit, especially if they're already on a "the West is encroaching on our motherland" narrative.

I still believe that if the Ukraine had made some token concession-- for example, offering a binding secession referrendum in the Donbass, that would have given Putin the bacon he needed to bring home without an actual war.

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

I think you’re possibly overthinking it. Being a dictator doesn’t normally come with a particularly enviable pension plan; once you fall out of the saddle, at best you’re going into exile, but often they just kill you. So Putin needs to stay in the saddle, forever. And thus, this sort of thing.

RandomThoughts34• 2 years ago

I would like to believe it too but western economic sanctions have overall done little. Russia is still finding takers for its gas (India and China notably but even European countries are still actually buying through third parties). It has found new allies in Africa. Plus it’s highly likely they will end up with territorial gain one the dust settles.

The war also highlighted some weaknesses and a general unpreparedness of the western allies.

The cost in human lives was high but I’m not convinced you can really call it a strategical defeat at this point sadly.

stnikolauswagne• 2 years ago

If this is not a strategic defeat then I struggle to think of what a defeat would actually look like. Ukrainian Troops entering the Kremlim?

They managed to: -get Sweden and Finland to finally join Nato

-completely demolish their entire military export potential

-lose half their warchest because they kept it in foreign banks

-lose all kinds of prestige the „mighty“ russian military had

-severely diminish the arms stocks they had left over from the soviet union

-lose the flagship of one of their fleets to a nation without a navy

-publically had one of their mercenary companies march on their capital in revolt

In exchange the land might gain from this is going to be completely devastated from the war.

Compare all of this to the 2014 fiasco where they ended up with crimea in exchange for some minor-ish sanctions,

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

I mean, if you’re Russia, being totally dependent on China is probably not a good outcome for you, and that seems to be where things are ending up. If nothing else you’d be depending on China remaining on-side forever, whereas in fact you’d assume China will use this dependence as a bargaining chip with the US and/or Europe at some point.

klibertp3• 2 years ago

Then Netanyahu came and made both Iraq and Ukraine look almost sane. I suspect we're still not anywhere near the inflection point: it's going to get much worse before it starts to get better.

a3n• 2 years ago

It's basically reduced them to a Chinese vassal state.

I like to think of them as North Korea's client state.

ForOldHack• 2 years ago

Oh the SHAME!

shermozle• 2 years ago

The inevitable "find out" phase that always follows the "fuck around" phase.

Russia: Citizens must turn off home surveillance because Ukrainians are coming

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