A part of the Russian public opinion is not resigned to the information brought down from the top of the Kremlin and uses various tools to bypass censorship. Among the most common are VPNs, which create an encrypted tunnel (virtual private network) between the user and the destination site.
But most VPNs have a flaw: they connect users’ computers to a central server. This means on the one hand that we must trust in the good faith of those who manage the service, and on the other hand it makes it easier to block it: since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the communications agency of Moscow, has blocked at least about twenty VPNs. This explains the recent boom in the diffusion of Lantern, a software that, unlike a normal VPN, relies on a decentralized network, similar to that used by programs for downloading music files, peer to peer, to allow users to access blocked content.
In recent weeks, as one of the developers explained to Vice, the Russian market has become a priority for Lantern (previously it was China) and the traffic passing through the app’s peer-to-peer hubs has increased by 100,000%. In all, Lantern is used by seven million people every month – still a relatively low number on a global scale, but growing rapidly.
The reference to peer-to-peer pirated software is not accidental: the president of Brave New Software, the non-profit that develops Lantern, is Adam Fisk, a former creator of Limewire, a file sharing program that, at the time gold, it came to have more than 80 million users and that for a long time was considered the true heir of Napster. Fisk and his team have been working at Lantern since at least 2010. The project gradually took shape, thanks to a series of small grants and a grant of $ 2.2 million from the US State Department.
From music file sharing to censorship
It is the experience gained at Limewire, which gave Fisk the idea of a product like Lantern. “We had to design all these crazy architectures to make peer-to-peer work. I realized that similar approaches could be used to circumvent censorship quite effectively,” he said in an interview. In a decentralized network, multiple copies of the same content are hosted by different servers, which simultaneously send pieces of it to the user. Once the download is complete, by combining the various data packages, it is possible to recompose the original content. A different type of peer-to-peer network is that of “mesh networks”, networks of users who share the bluetooth or wifi connection with each other, without going through a single hub. This is the principle behind apps like Firechat or Bridgefy, used by Hong Kong protesters to avoid monitoring by the authorities.
Like the hunt for extraterrestrials
The operation of Lantern is also somewhat reminiscent of Seti @ Home, a collective project in which millions of users make available a part of the computing power of the computer to analyze radio signals in search of alien intelligence. In this case, however, people who live in areas of the planet where the Internet is free, make part of their connection band available and act as an access point for those who are limited by censorship. The Lantern user connects to multiple peer to peer nodes at the same time, and if one of them is blocked, it is automatically redirected to the first available hub. This is how sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the BBC or the New York Times become usable again.
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China first
Lantern’s team cut their teeth fighting the Great Firewall of China. Once the application began to gain popularity and was even cited by famous dissidents like Ai Weiwei, censors began to worry and infiltrate the network. In the beginning, you could install the app by invitation only. However, the developers explained, “The way we allowed users to request invitations meant anyone could sign up, including censors.” At the end of 2013, Lantern in China was blocked. The developers managed to unlock it with a few tricks: improving the skimming process of the users who act as a hub; by diverting part of the traffic through the cloud infrastructures of large multinationals such as Amazon or Microsoft; disguising requests for access to blocked sites as if they were addressed to authorized sites.
“Overview” in Russia
Lantern recently added a new tool to their anti-censorship toolbox. Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, he advertised the availability of the “Overview” function on his Russian Telegram channel. Currently active only on the computer version, soon also on mobile, it is essentially a secure system for sharing material based on the decentralized BitTorrent protocol. Users can upload and download any content: text, images, videos, applications, pdf files, and so on, and exchange Lantern links with each other via social networks and instant messaging. Here, Alexei Navalny’s videos, for example, magically become available again.
Danger of balkanization
At the end of 2021, Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecommunications regulator, launched an investigation into Lantern. Thanks to the experience gained in China, the app is not afraid of blocking and has no intention of cooperating with censors and filtering content. The real danger is linked to the so-called balkanization of the Internet or, in this case, the possibility that Russia disconnects from the global Internet, as some observers believe it intends to do. If this happens (but there is currently no confirmation to this effect), it would no longer be possible even with Lantern to access blocked sites. For this app function to be available, the data must be able to transit on servers in countries where the web is free. However, the BitTorrent-based sharing system of Panoramica would remain: a digital version of Samizdat, the clandestine publishing of the 50s and 60s of the last century, created to defy the censors.
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