Inside the face-off between Russia and a small internet company

Swiss company Proton's cat and mouse experiment shows what it's like to be targeted by Russian censors and what it takes to fight back.

After Moscow erected a digital barricade in March, blocking access to independent news sites and social media platforms to hide information about its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, many Russians sought a workaround. A reliable route they found was from a small Swiss company based nearly 2,000 miles away.

The company, Proton, provides free software that hides the identity and location of a person online. This allows a user in Russia to access the open web by making it appear that the person is connecting from the Netherlands, Japan, or the United States. A few weeks after the Internet blockade, around 850,000 people in Russia used Proton every day, compared to less than 25,000.

That is to say until at the end of March, when the Russian government also found a way to block Proton.

Targeting Proton was the opening salvo of a continuous back and forth , pitting a team of around 25 engineers against a country embarking on one of the most aggressive censorship campaigns in recent history.

Working from a office in Geneva where the company keeps its name off the building directory, Proton spent nine months under pressure, repeatedly tweaking its technology to avoid Russian blockages, only to be thwarted again by government censors in Moscow. Some employees have removed Proton from their social media profiles for fear of being personally targeted.

High stakes chess match reflects what is played with frequency growing in countries facing coups, wars and authoritarian regimes, where internet restriction is a tool of repression. Blockages push citizens to seek workarounds. Engineers from companies like Proton are dreaming up new ways for these people to secretly access the open web. And governments, in turn, are looking for new technical tricks to plug the leaks. Grant Baker, Research Analyst for Technology and Democracy at Freedom House, who recently reported that internet censorship around the world hit a new high in 2022. While Russia has spent years working on a more sovereign internet tightly controlled, the controls imposed after the war are "a stark contrast" to anything Moscow had done before, Baker said.

Businesses rarely discuss be targeted by an authoritarian government for fear of escalating the conflict. But Andy Yen, founder and chief executive of Proton, said that after a period of trying to keep its head down, Proton wanted to raise awareness of the growing sophistication of governments, in Russia and elsewhere, to block citizens from accessing the web. open. and the need for technologists, businesses, and governments to push back.

Proton's tale offers a rare glimpse into what it's like to be entangled in Russia's censorship net as President Vladimir V. Putin is trying to suppress news about war and mounting battlefield casualties in Ukraine.

Dozens of VPN services have been blocked in Russia, but Proton, perhaps best known for its encryption email service, seemed to be receiving particular attention from the authorities. In June, Russia's internet regulator called the company a "threat".

"We are preparing for a long fight," Yen said in an interview at the company office. "Everyone's hoping this will have a happy ending, but it's not guaranteed. We don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, actually, but you keep going because if we don't, then maybe that no one else will.”

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