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Strings Attached: Talking about Russia's agenda for laws in cyberspace

Russia's longstanding proposals for "information security" agreements may sound cooperative, but they conceal a Trojan horse - a push to legitimize censorship, silence dissent, and bind others to rules it won’t follow.

In contrast, Russia, China, and their partners prefer the term ‘information security,’ which includes not only protecting data but also controlling content and communication tools that may threaten regime stability.” In practice, this means the Kremlin sees a tweet or YouTube video that inspires anti-government protests as just as dangerous as a piece of malware, if perhaps not more so. A somewhat recent Russian concept paper at the UN stressed the "inadmissibility" of using propaganda or political influence to interfere in other nations’ affairs - a completely surreal position given Russia's countless cyber operations against neighbors like Ukraine as well as the West, and brazen online "trolling" aimed at pretty much everyone.​ One could reasonably argue that cyberspace feels like the Wild West in part because of actions by Russia and similar autocratic states - massive ransomware outbreaks that caused global collateral damage, state-backed hacker groups meddling in foreign elections and infrastructure, and wholesale disinformation campaigns sowing chaos.

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