Image: Computer code. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com
U.S. privacy-policy whistleblower Edward Snowden made headlines recently for blasting an encryption-skirting provision in a new Russian Internet and cellphone regulation law.
The legislation requires Internet and mobile companies to provide authorities with a back door that gives them access to the contents of encrypted content. The government contends the law is aimed at preventing terrorism; opponents counter that it's also aimed at reining in dissidents.
Russia usually takes the lead in passing anti-human-rights legislation in the former Soviet Union, but in the case of the encryption-skirting provision, it took a cue from Kazakhstan, which enacted such legislation in late 2015.
What Russia does, other countries in the former Soviet Union imitate, of course, so you can be sure that encryption-busting legislation will pop up elsewhere in the region. One of the early adopters could be Armenia, which blocked Internet content during the election of 2008 and has a security treaty with Russia.
Snowden, who grained international notoriety for releasing classified U.S National Security Agency records that he said documented violations of Americans' privacy, fled the United States in 2013 to avoid espionage charges.
Russia granted him asylum.
He has not spoken a lot publicly since then. When he has, it's usually been to level additional criticism against U.S. government privacy policy. Sometimes his comments have come in videotaped presentations to international forums, sometimes in interviews with journalists.
Until a few days ago, Snowden was circumspect in his criticism of privacy violations in his host country.
Russia's new Internet and cellphone communication law set him off, however.
He criticized it on two grounds: First, that it was a gross violation of people's privacy. And, second, that it was unworkable.
Why unworkable? Because, he contended, Internet and cellphone-service providers would need to spend billions of dollars to create encryption-busting back doors and comply with a provision that requires them to store all emails and mobile records for six months.
"Russia's new Big Brother law is an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed," he tweeted on June 24, before the legislation hit Vladimir Putin's desk.
Kazakhstan's encryption-busting law, which went into effect on January 1 of this year, is different from Russia's in that it puts the burden on the owners of devices that connect with the Internet, rather than Internet and cellphone service providers.
The legislation requires Kazakhs to obtain software for each device they have -- computer, tablet or cellphone -- so that the government can have round-the-clock access to their encrypted communications.
This means that in Kazakhstan encryption prevents private parties from reading or listening to someone's communications, but not the government.
Privacy advocates warn that the government's access to a user's communications means that authorities can not only read or listen to the communications, but even edit both outgoing and incoming messages without the user knowing about it.
Kazakhstan has passed a series of laws since 2013 slapping restriction after restriction on Internet use.
The first set, in 2013, came in the wake of Islamic terrorist attacks in 2011 -- the country's first.
There have been other terrorist attacks since, including one in early June of this year in the western city of Aktobe that claimed 17 lives.
Kazakhstan has justified its increasingly restrictive Internet laws on the grounds that they are anti-terrorist measures -- the same justification that Russia used in enacting its Internet-tightening legislation last month.
But opponents of the Kazakhstan laws say they make it easier for the government to monitor and snuff out dissent.
Kazakhstan began cracking down on dissent the same year that its first terrorist attacks occurred -- 2011.
The catalyst was an oil workers' strike in the western city of Zhanoazen in December of 2011 that police put down with force, killing 14 and wounding at least 80. Workers had been demonstrating for months before the massacre, demanding better pay and working conditions from the government-owned KazMunaiGas corporation.
The combination of the terrorist attacks, and the show of dissent against the government represented by the Zhanoazen massacre, is what triggered the ever-more repressive Internet laws, political observers say.
Russia and Kazakhstan are far from the only countries to consider encryption-busting laws. Western countries have looked at them, too, as a way of fighting terrorism.
The difference is that encryption-busting laws in the former Soviet Union are far more likely to be used to try to snuff out dissent than similar laws in the West, human-rights organizations say. Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Follow her on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/ArmineSahakyann