Izatt Folkman

In recent months, Russia has been working with Chinese tech company Huawei to bolster its economy and infrastructure. Huawei has been able to leverage its joint venture with Russia to bolster their research and company goals.

Russia has a long history of cooperation and coalescence with India. Within the last three years, there has been several developments between to the countries with the goal of creating economic and defensive growth. While relations between the two countries has not always been smooth, Russia still considers India one of its “top 5 friends” (Bagchi, Indrani and Tnn).

Based on the rules Russia has proposed that oppose the Budapest Convention, the United States should continue to support the international collaboration within the Budapest Convention. The United States currently is involved in maintaining the balance between upholding its own cybersecurity laws and helping other countries uphold theirs. By keeping the Budapest Convention in place, the United States would continue to enforce its cybersecurity laws, which are necessary as it is one of the countries most affected by cybercrime (Peters). Maintaining these laws would also take away power from Russia and China, as they would allow continued access to international networks for monitoring and criminal activity tracking purposes. Russia and China both want to take more domestic control over Internet access by censoring and cutting off access to their Internet, and such policies threaten U.S. national security (Morgan, Ayres).

The current laws of cybersecurity are contained in a document known as the Convention on Cybercrime, also called the Budapest Convention. A couple of the main points in the Convention are that cybercrime can be an international concern, as opposed to being a concern on a country-by-country basis. This means that the United States may have to step in to help enforce cyber laws that may be legal in the United States, but illegal elsewhere, and that other countries can monitor each other’s’ internet activity under the guise of trying to find people who may be breaking foreign laws while residing in the United States. This, however, also allows the United States to have greater control of the Internet on its own shores, as anyone breaking copyright law internationally to proliferate materials could still be caught and reprimanded. The Convention can lead to many complex issues, but can also allow countries to maintain Internet freedom in the way they see fit. With the Internet becoming a global issue, there must be global standards for it, and the Budapest Convention allows global standards for the issue to exist (Anderson).

FaceApp recently came back into vogue after going viral for the first time in 2017. FaceApp uses AI to alter a person’s face with various filters (Giancaspro). This time around, however, many people began to realize that FaceApp was collecting metadata on all of the pictures they were uploading to the app for image processing. One of the main concerns of the app was that there was evidence that the app did all image processing server-side, giving FaceApp access to copies of pictures uploaded to it. These concerns were further exacerbated when consumers found out that FaceApp was created by a Russian company owned by a previous executive of Yandex. The CEO of the FaceApp company assured the media that FaceApp does send data to Russia, and evidence suggests that this is true (Carman).

Nearly 1,400 people were arrested last weekend in Moscow for protesting against the Kremlin’s decision to bar independent candidates from running for election in Moscow’s city Duma (Walker). While the police let go many of these people without much fuss, around 150 people remain in custody.

Russia created several heavy data laws after it illegally annexed Crimea and Western powers imposed sanctions on it (RFE/RL). However, one of the first data laws that Russia was involved with came about in 2012-2013 with the introduction of the now-defunct BRICS organization. BRICS was an organization of several countries spearheaded by Brazil and South Africa that aimed to create an Internet not centered on the United States. The organization planned to achieve this goal by laying its own fiber optic cable. Russia was involved, though it did not lead the initiative. As of 2015, BRICS has been inactive and seemingly dissolved (Lee).

Russia has a long history of cyber warfare. InvestigateRussia.org lists several of the important cyberattacks fueled by Russia during the 21st century. The Committee to Investigate Russia is a non-profit organization that worked during the Robert Mueller investigation as an aggregation of news pertaining to Russia’s affiliation with the US, and while no longer active still exists as culmination of information having to do with post-Soviet Russia.