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The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us two sides of technological progress. There’s the positive side that’s delivered
safe and effective vaccines
in record time, helped economies with new stay-at-home online tools and improved disease surveillance and public health.
And there’s the negative side that’s turbocharged
malicious actors’ and
authoritarian regimes’ disinformation campaigns, hacking and disruption of opponents, and fostered a rise in public harms like ransomware attacks and fraud.
It’s this grim reality that the West must tackle as economies reopen, and the G7 summit next month is a perfect time to do it. Cyber threats have been warned about over the past year, but the scale and reach of the problem are hitting new heights. The US and Europe have accused China and Russia of stepping up information warfare — from Covid-19 conspiracy theories to misleading information about vaccines — and cyberattacks on Western targets, while further restricting their citizens’ liberties at home. Freedom House, which last year found 75% of the world’s population lived in a country experiencing democratic decline, says the pandemic has cast a “digital shadow.†There’s no easy fix. Russia, for example, has left countries like the UK fuming as it fails to go after cybercriminals on its turf.
Moscow and Beijing’s push for digital “sovereignty†has emboldened authoritarian regimes, as seen in Belarus’s shocking forced landing of a Ryanair flight last week. The roots of this crisis, which has opened a new rift between the West and strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who enjoys Vladimir Putin’s backing,
lie in information warfare. Lukashenko’s ostensible target was 26-year-old Raman Pratasevich, an exiled journalist and former editor of opposition media Nexta, which operates through encrypted messaging app Telegram.
There’s a pattern of escalation. Last month, just days after Russia’s security services arrested two Belarusians and accused them of planning an uprising, Minsk said it had foiled a “coup†discussed on video-conferencing app Zoom. Belarus authorities have blocked websites and restricted
internet access since Lukashenko’s widely contested re-election in August (deemed by the EU to be neither free nor fair), and his Kremlin backers have lent their support.
The “skyjacking†sends the message that Minsk’s online critics aren’t safe anywhere, even in exile.
It fits neatly with Lukashenko’s persistent siege mentality as he whips up the threat of “hybrid†online-offline warfare supposedly being waged by the West. Crafting a strategy will require going beyond past language advocating “Internet freedom.†The drama around Belarus deserves its own response beyond necessary sanctions, and the EU and US should aim for more solidarity with Belarusian civil society (and journalists-in-exile) with more funding and support.
Political risk consultant Katia Glod says independent media need support to respond to continuous fines, to counter disinformation and launch alternative websites. As Tadeusz Giczan, Nexta’s current editor-in-chief, told the New Statesman, attempts to raise money via grants have been unsuccessful in the past, leading to financial difficulties. More resources to improve digital literacy would also help: Journalist Hanna Liubakova says independent media will benefit from more tools to combat censorship, whether via virtual private networks, mirroring websites — a way of replicating content via a different server and domain name to circumvent blocking — or other tools.
—Bloomberg