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Censorship is the suppression or deletion of material, which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor.

Typically censorship is done by governments, religious and secular groups, corporations, or the mass media, although other forms of censorship exist. The withholding of classified information, commercial secrets, intellectual property, and privileged lawyer-client communication is not usually described as censorship within the censoring community, though can be by outside observers. The term "censorship" often carries with it a sense of untoward, inappropriate or repressive secrecy.

Censorship is closely related to the concept of freedom of speech. It is often associated with human rights abuse, dictatorship, and repression.

The term "censorship" is often used as a pejorative term to signify a belief that a group controlling certain information is using this control improperly or for its own benefit, or preventing others from accessing information that should be made readily accessible (often so that conclusions drawn can be verified).

Confiscation of a forbidden book (poetry by Sergei Yesenin) in Gulag. Painting by Nikolai Getman, provided by The Jamestown Foundation.

The rationale for censorship is different for various types of data censored. Censorship is defined as the act or practice of removing obscene, vulgar, and highly objectionable material from things we encounter every day. Whether it is on TV, in music, books, or on the Internet censorship is an inescapable part of our lives. There are five main types of censorship:

A National Geographic Magazine censored by Iranian authorities. The offending cover was about the subject of love, and the picture hidden beneath the white sticker is of an embracing couple.[1] February 2006.

The Rhodesia Herald of September 21, 1966.

Wieczr Wrocawia" - Daily newspaper of Wrocaw, People's Republic of Poland, March 20-21-21, 1981, with censor intervention on first and last pages --- under the headlines "Co zdarzyo si w Bydgoszczy?" (What happened in Bydgoszcz?) and "Pogotowie strajkowe w caym kraju" (Country-wide strike alert). The censor had removed a section regarding the strike alert; hence the workers in the printing house blanked out an official propaganda section. The right-hand page also includes a hand-written confirmation of that decision by the local "Solidarno" Trade Union.

In wartime, explicit censorship is carried out with the intent of preventing the release of information that might be useful to an enemy. Typically it involves keeping times or locations secret, or delaying the release of information (e.g., an operational objective) until it is of no possible use to enemy forces. The moral issues here are often seen as somewhat different, as release of tactical information usually presents a greater risk of casualties among one's own forces and could possibly lead to loss of the overall conflict. During World War I letters written by British soldiers would have to go through censorship. This consisted of officers going through letters with a black marker and crossing out anything which might compromise operational secrecy before the letter was sent. The World War II catchphrase "Loose lips sink ships" was used as a common justification to exercise official wartime censorship and encourage individual restraint when sharing potentially sensitive information.

An example of sanitization policies comes from the USSR under Joseph Stalin, where publicly used photographs were often altered to remove people whom Stalin had condemned to execution. Though past photographs may have been remembered or kept, this deliberate and systematic alteration to all of history in the public mind is seen as one of the central themes of Stalinism and totalitarianism.

The content of school textbooks is often the issue of debate, since their target audience is young people, and the term "whitewashing" is the one commonly used to refer to selective removal of critical or damaging evidence or comment. The reporting of military atrocities in history is extremely controversial, as in the case of the Nanking Massacre, the Holocaust (or Holocaust denial), and the Winter Soldier Investigation of the Vietnam War. The representation of every society's flaws or misconduct is typically downplayed in favor of a more nationalist, favorable or patriotic view.

Religious groups have at times attempted to block the teaching of evolution in publicly-funded schools as it contradicts their religious beliefs or have argued that they are being censored if not allowed to teach creationism. The teaching of sexual education in school and the inclusion of information about sexual health and contraceptive practices in school textbooks is another area where suppression of information occurs.

In the context of secondary-school education, the way facts and history are presented greatly influences the interpretation of contemporary thought, opinion and socialization. One argument for censoring the type of information disseminated is based on the inappropriate quality of such material for the young. The use of the "inappropriate" distinction is in itself controversial, as it can lead to a slippery slope enforcing wider and more politically-motivated censorship. Some artists such as Frank Zappa helped in the protest against censorship. Although they usually failed, they did put up an argument against the censorship of other material.

An example of such censorship is, ironically, Fahrenheit 451. The book was themed against censorship, but changed heavily. A Ballantine Books version which is the version used by most school classes[2] contained approximately 75 separate edits, omissions, and changes from the original Bradbury manuscript.[clarify]

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Scientific studies may be suppressed or falsified because they undermine sponsors' commercial, political or other interests or because they fail to support researchers' ideological goals. Examples include, failing to publish a study which shows that a new drug is harmful, or truthfully publishing the benefits of a treatment while failing to describe harmful side-effects. Scientific research may also be suppressed or altered to support a political agenda. In the United States some government scientists, including NASA climatologist Drew Shindell, have reported governmental pressure to alter their statements regarding climate change.[3]

In Victorian England, portrayal of public officials, among other things, was forbidden. The Lord Chamberlain, an official responsible for censoring plays, created a scandal in 1873 by banning The Happy Land for its portrayal of Prime Minister William Gladstone and two other ministers in his cabinet. In response, Marie Litton, the manager of the theatre where it was performed, agreed to amend it to a censored version - and printed a script with the censored lines in all capital letters to make the censorship easier to spot.[4]

American musicians such as Frank Zappa have repeatedly protested against censorship in music and pushed for more freedom of expression. In 1986, Zappa appeared on CNN's Crossfire to protest censorship of lyrics in rock music, saying that harm will be done or unrest caused if controversial information, lyrics, or other messages are promulgated.

In countries like Sudan, Afghanistan and China, violations of musicians rights to freedom of expression are commonplace. In the USA and Algeria, lobbying groups have succeeded in keeping popular music off the concert stage, and out of the media and retail. In ex-Yugoslavia musicians are often pawns in political dramas, and the possibility of free expression has been adversely affected.

Music censorship has been implemented by states, religions, educational systems, families, retailers and lobbying groups and in most cases they violate international conventions of human rights.[5]

Copy approval is the right to read and amend an article, usually an interview, before publication. Many publications refuse to give copy approval but it is increasingly becoming common practice when dealing with publicity anxious celebrities.[6] Picture approval is the right given to an individual to choose which photos will be published and which will not. Robert Redford is well known for insisting upon picture approval.[7] Writer approval is when writers are chosen based on whether they will write flattering articles or not. Hollywood publicist Pat Kingsley is known for banning certain writers who wrote undesirably about one of her clients from interviewing any of her other clients.[7]

Censorship is regarded among a majority of academics in the Western world as a typical feature of dictatorships and other authoritarian political systems. Democratic nations are represented, especially among Western government, academic and media commentators, as having somewhat less institutionalized censorship, and as instead promoting the importance of freedom of speech. The former Soviet Union maintained a particularly extensive program of state-imposed censorship. The main organ for official censorship in the Soviet Union was the Chief Agency for Protection of Military and State Secrets generally known as the Glavlit, its Russian acronym. The Glavlit handled censorship matters arising from domestic writings of just about any kind even beer and vodka labels. Glavlit censorship personnel were present in every large Soviet publishing house or newspaper; the agency employed some 70,000 censors to review information before it was disseminated by publishing houses, editorial offices, and broadcasting studios. No mass medium escaped Glavlit's control. All press agencies and radio and television stations had Glavlit representatives on their editorial staffs.

Censored pre-press proof of two articles from "Noticias da Amadora", a Portuguese newspaper, 1970.

Some thinkers understand censorship to include other attempts to suppress points of view or the exploitation of negative propaganda, media manipulation, spin, disinformation or "free speech zones." These methods tend to work by disseminating preferred information, by relegating open discourse to marginal forums, and by preventing other ideas from obtaining a receptive audience.

Sometimes, a specific and unique information whose very existence is barely known to the public, is kept in a subtle, near-censorship situation, being regarded as subversive or inconvenient. Michel Foucaults 1978 text Sexual Morality and the Law (later republished as "The Danger of Child Sexuality"), for instance - originally published as La loi de la pudeur [literally, the law of decency], defends the decriminalization of statutory rape and the abolition of age of consent laws,[8] and as of July 2006, is almost totally invisible throughout the internet, both in English and French, and does not appear even on Foucault-specialized websites.

Suppression of access to the means of dissemination of ideas can function as a form of censorship. Such suppression has been alleged to arise from the policies of governmental bodies, such as the FDA and FCC in the United States of America, the CRTC in Canada, newspapers that refuse to run commentary the publisher disagrees with, lecture halls that refuse to rent themselves out to a particular speaker, and individuals who refuse to finance such a lecture. The omission of selected voices in the content of stories also serves to limit the spread of ideas, and is often called censorship. Such omission can result, for example, from persistent failure or refusal by media organizations to contact criminal defendants (relying solely on official sources for explanations of crime). Censorship has been alleged to occur in such media policies as blurring the boundaries between hard news and news commentary, and in the appointment of allegedly biased commentators, such as a former government attorney, to serve as anchors of programs labeled as hard news but comprising primarily commentary.

The focusing of news stories to exclude questions that might be of interest to some audience segments, such as the avoidance of reporting cumulative casualty rates among citizens of a nation that is the target or site of a foreign war, or the values of natural methods in the prevention, treatment, and curing of disease, is often described as a form of censorship. Favorable representation in news or information services of preferred products or services, such as reporting on leisure travel and comparative values of various machines instead of on leisure activities such as arts, crafts or gardening has been described by some as a means of censoring ideas about the latter in favor of the former.

Self-censorship: Imposed on the media in a free market by market/cultural forces rather than a censoring authority. This occurs when it is more profitable for the media to give a biased view.

In this form of censorship, any information about existence of censorship and the legal basis of the censorship is censored. Rules of censoring were classified. Removed texts or phrases were not marked.[clarify]

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In this form of censorship, censors rewrite texts, giving these texts secret co-authors.[clarify]

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Under US law, the First Amendment protects free speech and freedom of the press to some degree. Radio broadcasts are under constant scrutiny. This amendment does not mention many things, one being obscenity (a term usually applied to sexual material), but the common interpretation ignores this aspect using the argument that there is no social value deemed applicable to it. This applies only to the government and government entities; private corporations are under no such restriction.

Main article: Censorship of maps

Google Earth censors places which may be of special security concern. The following is a selection of such concerns:

Censorship in the Internet - In January 2007, a Brazilian Supreme Court judge issued an order to Brasil Telecom and Telefonica preventing public access to an intimate video of model Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend Renato Malzonithe on the YouTube site. Cicarelli and Malzoni had sued YouTube the previous year and got an injunction for the removal of the video, but it was still appearing. YouTube staff were eventually able to prevent the video from appearing on their site.[9]

Wikipedia itself is unavailable to Internet servers in certain countries, such as Iran, China, and North Korea, due to Internet censorship. [10]

Censorship of nudity

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Censorship | Psychology Wiki | Fandom

The Ethereum community has been divided over how to best respond to the threat of protocol-level transaction censorship in the wake of the United States government sanctions on Tornado Cash-linked addresses.

Over the last week, Ethereum community members have proposed social slashing or even a user-activated soft fork (UASF) as possible responses to transaction-level censorship on Ethereum, with some calling it a trap that will do more harm than good and others stating its necessary to provide credible neutrality and censorship resistance properties on Ethereum.

The heated debate comes after Ethereum miner Ethermine elected not to process transactions from the now U.S. sanctioned Ethereum-based privacy tool Tornado Cash, which has prompted members of the Ethereum community to worry about what would happen if other centralized validators did the same.

The Ethereum community is also debating the effectiveness of social slashing to combat censorship on the Ethereum network, as the strategy could lead to a chain split with some validators processing transactions on the censorship-less chain and the others validating only the OFAC-compliant chain.

Social slashing is the process whereby validators have a percentage of their stake slashed if they dont correctly validate the incoming transactions or otherwise act dishonestly.

This may become a significant issue if regulators require major centralized staking services like Coinbase and other major centralized pools, which together stake more than 50% of Ether (ETH) in the Ethereum Beacon 2.0 chain to only validate OFAC-compliant chains.

Founder of Cyber Capital Justin Bons argues thatslashing is a trap that represents a greater risk than the OFAC regulation and will not be a viable solution to tackle censorship at the protocol level.

In a 21-part Twitter thread on Monday, Bons said that social slashing exchanges may deprive innocent users of their deposits, which would violate their property rights.

Bons also said that too many validators complying with law enforcement on Ethereum would lead to a chain split, at the point at which censors start ignoring or do not attest blocks that contain OFAC violating TXs.

Founder of Ethereum podcast The Daily Gwei Anthony Sassano wrote on Twitter on Saturday that collateral damage is inevitable in social slashing [...] its worth it to protect Ethereums credible neutrality and censorship resistance properties.

Meanwhile, Geth developer Marius Van Der Wijgen shared a similar sentiment stating that preserving censorship on the Ethereum network should be the Ethereum communitys highest priority:

If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum then this whole thing doesnt make sense and I will be leaving the ecosystem. [...] I think censorship resistance is the highest goal of Ethereum and of the blockchain space in general, so if we compromise on that, theres not much else to do, in my opinion, he added.

Related: Tornado Cash ban could spell disaster for other privacy protocols Manta co-founder

Crypto researcher Eric Wall added that to date, censorship resistance has served as a core property on the Ethereum network and that while were seeing some censorship on the front end, itll only get bad if censorship starts happening side Ethereum itself.

The Tornado Cash sparked censorship debacle has plagued the Ethereum community for over a week now.

Read the original:
Ethereum community splits over solutions for transaction censorship - Cointelegraph

In response to the sanctions, advocacy groups such as Coin Center have come to the mixers defense arguing that the smart contract code is not a sanctionable entity.

With this new precedent, it is unclear if privacy coins such as Monero will face similar censorship. A hard fork update on Aug. 13 reportedly made Monero transactions harder to trace potentially closing any back doors law agencies used to track transactions.

The view that any cryptocurrency transaction is private by default is a common misconception. In fact, the opposite is true. Blockchain data is public and transactions are traceable. Crypto mixers and privacy coins were created to provide privacy for this open financial system. But both face different uphill battles. Before analyzing the likelihood of eithers success, we need to explain how they work, where they differ and the regulatory strategy game of financial censorship.

A crypto mixer, also known as a tumbler or blender, is a transaction mixing tool or service that anyone can use to obscure a crypto wallets source of funds. These tools were first created for bitcoin in 2013 but became a popular alternative to privacy coins once solutions like Tornado Cash made it available for a variety of cryptoassets.

There are two types of crypto mixers: custodial and non-custodial. Custodial blenders such as blender.io are central entities that take full custody of funds to mix transactions. Users pay a fee for the service and trust the entity to return their funds once the transactions are blended.

Blender.io was the first mixer to be sanctioned by US Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It did not receive the same attention as Tornado Cash because it fell under the pattern of previous sanctions made against persons and entities. A North Korean state-sponsored hacker collective known as the Lazarus Group reportedly used the service after a hack against Axie Infinity that resulted in a $620 million loss.

Tornado Cash is an Ethereum based crypto blender that uses non-custodial smart contracts to mix ETH and ERC-20 tokens. Users send funds to smart contract addresses that organize them by amount and effectively mix the deposits through a zero-knowledge proof contract.

For example, say you want to mix 11 ETH. Since deposits are organized by amount, you could deposit 10 ETH to the 10 ETH mixer and 1 ETH to the 1 ETH mixer. Once funds are sent to each blender, the zero-knowledge proof would verify you sent a deposit to each one without revealing which one was originally yours. This essentially gives you the equivalent of a withdrawal permission slip for each mixer.

So if you were to use the permission slips to withdraw both deposits, it would be close to impossible for any outside observer to identify the correct source of funds. They would see a myriad of potential options.

The tool provides pretty good financial privacy by breaking the link between the sender and receiver. But its not perfect; theoretically, third party blockchain intelligence could use outside data and behavior models in an attempt to deduce which transaction history belongs to the tokens on your new wallet address.

On Aug. 8, 2022, OFAC added a list of addresses associated with Tornado Cash to the same list of sanctioned addresses where Blender.io ended up. This was in response to news that the Lazarus Group used the tool to launder $455 million in stolen funds.

OFAC used the same messaging and reasoning as it did Blender.io, but it did not acknowledge the key custodial difference between the two. In Coin Centers full analysis, they argue that Tornado Cash has two separate elements: The decentralized group of governing members they call Tornado Cash Entity and the immutable smart contract coin mixers they call Tornado Cash Application.

The Tornado Cash Entity cannot update or change the Tornado Cash Application because the original creators destroyed their admin keys. The smart contracts will exist as long as the Ethereum blockchain continues to operate. So even though the Tornado Cash website is down, anyone can spin up a new front end or interface with the smart contracts directly that lets users access the same mixers.

The problem is that OFAC included these immutable smart contract addresses in the list of sanctions. So there are now innocent Americans with funds still in these mixers. If they attempt to move the funds, they will be breaking the law and subject to penalty. And because the application is not an entity, it has no means to petition OFAC for sanction removal.

Coin Center further argues that because the Tornado Cash Application is not an entity, OFAC did not cite the proper authority to add the smart contract addresses to the sanctions list. This marks an unprecedented move with potential constitutional issues.

In response to OFACs announcement, companies agreed to censor anyone connected to these addresses. The decentralized finance app Aave blocked any users that had Tornado Cash funds sent to them in a dust attack. The team behind Uniswap later followed suite by banning 253 wallet addresses connected to the mixer. Circle also censored users by freezing 75,000 usd coin stablecoins in the smart contracts. The Blockworks Empire podcast explains how that is possible in a Twitter thread.

Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that use a variety of approaches to obscure IP addresses, wallet balances and the flow of funds from public view. They differ from crypto mixers in that they make financial privacy less of a feature and more of a product. As a result, they only provide privacy to transactions made in a specific currency.

The two most popular privacy coins are Z-cash and Monero. Z-cash is a cryptocurrency that relies primarily on zero-knowledge proofs to shield transaction info. In October 2018, Z-cash announced that they fixed an 8-month-old bug in proofs that could have permitted an infinite inflation of supply. Due to transaction privacy, it was unclear how much was actually inflated.

Since this early stumble, z-cash has never returned to the highs of the 2017 bull cycle and currently ranks second to Monero in total privacy coin market cap. While monero was able to once again reach similar prices of the 2017 market, it failed to break its all-time high in 2021.

Monero is a privacy coin that offers financial anonymity through layers of privacy-enhanced blockchain encryption. Every transaction utilizes single-use stealth addresses to prevent the visibility of public address balances. So only users with a wallets private key can map its balance back to a public address. It also uses ring signatures to obscure the source of funds in a transaction by including random addresses in the verification signature.

The Monero protocol was upgraded on Aug. 13. While the previous version of Monero offered a layer of privacy, its complete untraceability was debatable. In 2018, critics claimed that inputs in a signature ring could be deduced through a process of elimination. And in 2021, CipherTracer reportedly patented a method that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses to trace transactions.

Even if CipherTracer discovered real vulnerabilities, the extent of their impact is unclear. They didnt disclose their methods or success rate. This previous version still provided a degree of financial privacy in the sense that it blocked anyone not willing to pay CipherTracer.

But this disincentive is less resistant to state sanctions and censorship. Theoretically, the state is more willing to spend resources in an attempt to trace addresses especially if they suspect a connection to crime, or in some countries, political opposition.

In Canada, an effort was made to trace financial contributions to the trucker freedom convoy. The government ended up sanctioning 34 crypto wallets in connection to the movement, and Monero addresses were included in that list.

The Monero developers hope this update will close any potential vulnerability by increasing the number of transactions in a ring signature. But in response to the update, CipherTracer stated, While Moneros upcoming chain improvements are significant, the fundamentals of our approach to tracing probable source of funds will still apply after the fork.

If the upgrade does succeed in closing these back doors, there is concern that OFAC may take similar actions against Monero. In an interview with CoinDesk, a Monero contributor said that, at the moment, Im not concerned about immediate legal action.

There is no direct financial incentivefor developers, unlike [the situation with] the Tornado Cash developer, he said.

These comments seem to infer that the potential ability for the developer to profit from the use of these smart contracts makes him liable. Dutch financial crimes agency FIOD arrested a Tornado Cash developer on suspicion of laundering money through the tool. But it is unclear if that arrest was for his specific attempts to launder money or for his connection to others using it for that purpose.

Even though top privacy coins such as monero and z-cash are actively working to increase the privacy of transactions, they have not seen the same degree of adoption as leading layer-1 blockchains such as Ethereum. Many competitors, including Secret Network and Oasis Network, argue that the reason for this lag is that privacy coins do not offer a base layer of privacy that can be used to build Web3.

In 2020 Secret Network was the first privacy based blockchain to enable smart contract programmability. It lives in the Cosmos ecosystem and is working toward a vision of Web3 privacy. It has launched multiple apps such as the decentralized messaging service Altermail, and decentralized exchange SiennaSwap.

But Secret Network and its competitors face the classic challenge of an overcrowded sector. They still have a long way in overcoming the market dominance of Monero and Z-Cash. The threat of sanctions have motivated many in the Z-Cash community to explore creating their own smart contract programmability.

The battle against financial privacy feels like a game of whack-a-mole. So far, the state has tried two different tools. With crypto mixers, they used the regulatory sanctions hammer. And for privacy coins, they tried blockchain intelligence sleuths.

Their approach may be, if one financial privacy method is too popular with criminals or too hard to trace, they will just shut it down with the hammer.

Advocacy groups such as Coin Center may respond by challenging such actions in court, but that process will take years. The sanctions are very likely hurting innocent Americans in the meantime.

For other privacy solutions, they may use investigations to continue in their cat and mouse chase with developer upgrades.

User adoption, though, is a key element to this game. As more people are drawn to either mixers or privacy coins, the chance of tracing transactions becomes exponentially difficult. Switching analogies, its like the classic police chase down a narrow alley. If the suspect reaches a bustling parade, they can dust off and subtly slip away into the crowd.

If a privacy coin, mixer or base-layer privacy solution gains mainstream adoption, it could have greater resistance to censorship. State officials would struggle to find the political backing for sweeping sanctions or technology needed to crack privacy measures. And the potential Tornado Cash sanctions fallout for Ethereum validators may pull millions more into this conversation.

Get the days top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening.Subscribe to Blockworks free newsletternow.

Blockworks

Editor, Evergreen Content

John is the Editor of Evergreen Content at Blockworks. He manages the production of explainers, guides and all educational content for anything crypto related. Before Blockworks, he was the producer and founder of an explainer studio called Best Explained.

See the original post here:
Crypto Mixers and Privacy Coins: Can They Resist Censorship? - Blockworks

Russia's failure to secure a quick victory against Ukraine forced Vladimir Putin to adapt.

Over the past six months, Russia has been fighting an information war alongside its military campaign.

How Moscow rerouted the internet

On 30 May the internet connection in occupied Kherson dropped. It returned within hours, but people could no longer access sites like Facebook, Twitter and Ukrainian news.

The internet had been rerouted to Russia. The online activity of those in Kherson was now visible to Moscow and was subject to censorship.

Internet traffic in Kherson was originally routed from network hubs elsewhere in the country and passed through Kyiv.

These connections remained in place during the first three months of the invasion before it was rerouted.

As Russia gained strength in southern Ukraine, reports emerged that it was taking over control of local internet providers in Kherson either through cooperation or by force.

Once in control, Russia could reroute the internet to Moscow via a state-owned internet provider in Crimea.

This briefly happened on 1 May, before Ukrainian officials managed to reverse it. But on 30 May, with Russia now in control of more infrastructure, it happened again. It now appears permanent.

With the people of Kherson now forced to use Russian internet if they want to go online, they are subject to Moscow's censorship.

For three months they have been unable to access Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Some Ukrainian news websites are also blocked.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, an internet monitoring company, says the rerouting has "effectively placed Ukrainian citizens under the purview and surveillance of the Russian state at the flick of a switch."

Internet operators and monitors report internet access in large areas of Kherson is censored to a similar level as experienced in Russia. Some smaller areas are experiencing even tougher censorship, with some Google services blocked.

Ukrainians in Kherson are finding ways to evade Russia's efforts to monitor and censor their online activity.

When Ivanna (not her real name) leaves her home, she deletes social media and messaging apps like Instagram and Telegram in case she is stopped by a soldier who may search her phone.

"You need to be careful," she tells Sky News, using an online messaging app.

She goes online using a VPN (virtual private network) which hides the user's location and allows them to bypass Russian censorship.

Searches for the software spiked in Kherson when internet controls tightened.

Russia has also shut down the mobile phone network in Kherson and new SIM cards are being sold for locals to use.

Ivanna told Sky News a passport is needed to buy the sim cards, prompting fears their use may be tracked.

Cautious, she paid a stranger to buy a SIM under his name.

TV and phone communications targeted

In the unoccupied parts of Ukraine, Moscow has sought to destroy the communication infrastructure - such as TV towers and communication centres.

It's a tactic Russia initially wanted to avoid as it did not want to damage resources that would be useful as an occupying force, explains William Alberque, director of strategy, technology, and arms control for the Institute for Strategic Studies.

"Russia thought they were going to win so fast [so wouldn't] destroy infrastructure as it was going to own that infrastructure," he tells Sky News.

Subscribe to the Ukraine War Diaries on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and Spreaker

But by keeping the lines open, Ukrainians were able to communicate with one another and the wider world.

Ultimately Russia moved to destroy what it was unable to quickly seize.

Examples of the attacks on communication infrastructure have been logged by the Centre for Information Resilience, which has been tracking and verifying attacks like these using open-source information.

One incident logged by the group was a communication centre in southern Ukraine.

Russia's attempt to control information has also included targeting TV towers.

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Power cuts in Ukraine have also caused the nation's biggest broadband and mobile internet providers to lose connectivity.

Disinformation has doubled since the war began

Russia has used disinformation during the war to influence those in Ukraine, the country's allies, as well as its own population at home.

Examples of pro-Russian fake news include a clumsily faked video of the Ukrainian president telling people to surrender (known as a deepfake video) and social media posts accusing bombing victims of being actors.

Some of Russia's efforts have been effective. Moscow claimed the invasion was in part to tackle nazism in the Ukrainian government. Searches for "nazi" in both Russia and worldwide spiked in the first week of the war.

The number of disinformation sites has more than doubled since the Russian invasion in February, according to Newsguard, which provides credibility rankings for news and information sites.

In March, its researchers found 116 sites publishing Russia-Ukraine war-related disinformation. By August, that number had risen to 250.

It's not possible to show that all of those sites are run on the orders of Russia, however, Moscow has allocated a boosted pot of funds for its propaganda arm.

The independent Russian-language news site The Moscow Times reported the government had "drastically increased funding for state-run media amid the war with Ukraine".

The article cited figures provided by the Russian government. It said 17.4bn rubles (244m) had been allocated for "mass media" compared to 5.4bn rubles (76m) the year before.

It said in March, once the war was underway, some 11.9bn rubles (167m) were spent. This is more than twice as much as the combined spend of the two months before, which was 5bn rubles (70m).

The research comes as no surprise to Mr Alberque, who says Russia's disinformation campaign has been "constant".

"As they shift into war mode, [Russia] has to go to directly paying salaries and no longer hoping that people will echo its messages but paying them to send a certain number of messages per day," he told Sky News.

Looking forward, Mr Alberque believes the death of the daughter of an ally of Vladimir Putin will be a distraction for those directing Russia's disinformation efforts.

Russia has pointed the finger at Ukraine for carrying out the fatal car bombing in Moscow but Kyiv denies any involvement.

An apparent high-profile assassination in the capital has sparked a number of conspiracy theories, including claims the responsibility may lie with a Russian group looking to influence the war.

"The Russian government is going to have to try to control this narrative," Mr Alberque explains.

He adds that propaganda resources that would be focused on Ukraine may now be drawn into the fallout of the death, saying: "I think it's going to be a huge information sink for them because it's going to take up time and attention."

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Why data journalism matters to Sky News

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How Putin used internet censorship and fake news for six months to push the Ukraine war agenda - Sky News

Fiction writer Anthony Marra joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss how his new historical novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, echoes the rights current embrace of authoritarianism in the U.S. and globally. By looking at censorship in 1940s Hollywood and the fascist regime of Italy during that same period, Marra teases out truths about conservatives current interest in controlling popular opinion.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHubs Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fictions YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*From the episode:

Anthony Marra: Mercury Pictures Presents is, shall we say, a long-awaited novel. It was during the run-up to the 2016 election when I first began to really see the parallels between so much of what these characters are struggling with and what many people in the U.S. in 2016 were in terms of trying to understand this rising threat.

Whitney Terrell: One of the ways that your book works, and I was very impressed by, is by resurrecting stories about life under actual fascism, particularly in Italy. It helped me imagine how such a regime might happen here in the United States. I was particularly interested in the character of Giuseppe Lagana, whos a lawyer, and who gets caught up, sort of at odds with, Mussolinis regime. Could you talk a little bit about him and how he gets into trouble?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. So, Giuseppe is the father of the novels central character, Maria Lagana, and he works as a defense attorney in Rome, primarily defending socialists and anarchists prosecuted by the state. And to me, he is this heartbreaking figure in that he continues to believe in the rule of law and the impartiality of the court and the nobility of defending the accused, even as Mussolinis regime chips and chips and chips away at the underpinnings of the justice system, eventually instituting these tribunals that pass sentences without trials altogether.

And Giuseppes way of trying to quietly resist that is simply to document the lawlessness of these tribunals, which eventually leads to his own arrest. And he is sentenced to

Its one of those things where you can see sort of through Giuseppe, through his gradual realization that the world that he believed he was living in had slipped away much earlier than he had thought, and I always felt as I was working on that during the Trump years, just just seeing how much of things that I believed in about America turned out to be empty, and how many aspects of my own relationship to my country were built on this sort of false mythologythat was certainly something that Giuseppes character helped illuminate for me in my own personal life.

V.V Ganeshananthan: Giuseppe is also one of my favorite characters. I was reminded actually of conversations Id had with lawyers who would tell me that they were documenting for precisely the reason that Giuseppe documents, which made it feel very alive to me. Theres a remarkable early scene where Giuseppe and Maria, who you spoke of, are attending a showing of the movie

In LA after Maria has fled Italy, she and her boss Artie Feldman, battle U.S. censors who consider Arties films decadent and too critical of fascism. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the role of censorship coming from different actors in the novel.

AM: The forces of reactionary conservatism have obviously long embraced censorship as a way to mold society to their liking. And the great irony in all of it, of course, is that its the very people waving around pocket-sized Constitutions who are the first to ban books. In the period covered by this novel, all movies were censored by an organization called the Production Code Administration.

And a lot of this resulted in truly ridiculous forms of censorship as the production code strove to make movies gratuitously inoffensive. For decades, you couldnt show a pregnant woman on screen because it might raise uncomfortable questions about where babies really come from. You couldnt show a couple on the same bed unless both of their feet were planted on the ground. If you remember the movie Psycho, it was chiefly scandalous for the fact that it was the first movie in about 30 years to show a toilet bowl. In the bathroom scene, theres a toilet bowl, and a toilet bowl had not been seen on screen since the early 30s.

Of course, much more insidious than this priggish sense of morality was the production codes prohibition on politics. If you only received your news in the 1930s from your local picture house, you would have thought that the American South was untouched by Jim Crow, and that Europe was untouched by fascism. By the late 30s, filmmakers were beginning to push back against this censorship often by very convoluted means. For instance, there was a movie made in the late 30s, about the Spanish Civil War.

But the only way that the filmmakers could get past the censors was to make it an absurdly unfaithful depiction of the conflict. So they actually brought experts in who had participated in the Spanish Civil War in order to make sure that the movie was meticulously inaccurate. They made sure that the uniforms were all wrong, that the settings were incorrect. And so the only way to make a movie about a true and contentious subject was to turn it into pure fantasy.

In September 1941, there were enough of these anti-fascist movies that isolationists in the U.S. Senate began to hold hearings to investigate so-called Hollywood war propaganda. The heads of the major studios all testified there, and they really acquitted themselves brilliantly. They more or less used the opportunity to reveal the hypocrisy behind the investigations themselves. And three months later, following Pearl Harbor, those filmmakers and executives were fully vindicated.

VVG: One of the ways the different kinds of censorship intersect across borders here is in the figure of Maria, who corresponds with her father, who is confined in the manner that you described earlier. Theyre corresponding and his letters are censored, and then she uses her knowledge of how things are censored or how to get things past censors in the film industry, which I thought was so interesting. There are characters who are in really quiet ways censoring themselves or by strategizing about censorship or who, behaving in response to censorship, are altering what they might say in ways that they almost dont recognize.

AM: I feel like we have a certain number of themes that we keep returning to, a certain number of ideas that kind of animate our work. And for whatever reason, censorship is one that Ive returned to in several of my books. Do you all find that in your own work that youre kind of almost like reshuffling the same deck of cards in each new project?

WT: Yeah, I have themes that I go back to you all the time. Sure, absolutely. I think thats true for everyone. I wanted to point out, back to the lawyer thing, when Trump was appointing so many judges, thats when the way that the legal system in Italy changed in the 30s, to cease to be really a legal system and be like an authoritarian legal system that doesnt apply rule of law any more I started realizing, Oh, that was kind of the idea. Thats why it was so important to him to get judges. If you can end the way the court system works, you get around that, then you start moving toward authoritarianism.

Similarly, when you start controlling information and you start leaning on calling things decadent, you can use decadence, like the kiss in the recent Buzz Lightyear movie, or whatever it is you want to call decadent, to suppress political content that you dont like. And thats what youre also talking about here is that the real reason that censorship was going on in the 30s and 40s, and in your novel, the head censor is a Catholic, surely not an accident, and he is really concerned about not hearing a lot of criticism for fascism. So he uses sex as an excuse to basically censor that political side. And I feel like thats exactly whats happening today.

AM: Yeah, absolutely. Criticisms toward changes in culture are camouflage for these very specific and intense political ideologies and agendas. Im curious what you all think about the changes in censorship over time, because one of the things that I was thinking about over the last several months, just reading the news and seeing, talking about, book bannings and all of that is just how much less effective censorship is today.

Im not sure if its a result of technology, just giving us so much access to information that if your local library bans a particular book, there are just so many more venues for you to find it in. Maybe its also that in the present day, weve just become hopefully somewhat more educated about the intentions and motivations behind the censorship But I could be talking complete bullshit. So Id love to hear your thoughts, Sugi.

VVG: I dont think youre talking complete bullshit, but I guess I wonder who are the we who know how censorship operates? Because theres obviously a whole set of people who are buying whats being sold. Theres this list of books that have been banned in, I think, Utah, thats going around, and it has a huge number of LGBTQIA-associated books, and then some of them are bestsellers.

And so theres this increased surveillance, but then theres also these increased ways to get around it and a population that maybe is better at getting around some of the things that we might expect to be censorship. But then it does seem like theres this other set of people who are whos the audience for the propaganda? Someones putting out the propaganda movies and someone sits in the audience and cheers and feels good about watching it. There are parts of me that like a good montage and a movie with a rousing Hans Zimmer score; I cant pretend that that part of me is not there. How has censorship changed over time? I think that my wariness of the American government has certainly increased. Im curious what you would say about this, Whitney.

WT: We did a couple episodes on book banning earlier on. And one of the things that came out is that when youre in a conservative state or a state thats run by conservatives like Florida, the teachers start getting really worried about what they can and cannot teach. So when youre dealing with public school teachers, or even public university professors, professors are a little bit more protected than school teachers. But I do think that censorship and state rules on what you can and cannot teach really will start to affect what high school and middle school and elementary school teachers feel comfortable teaching. And that actually can change how the kids are educated. I think thats why conservatives are concerned with that.

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Selected Readings:

Anthony Marra Mercury Pictures Presents The Tsar of Love and Techno A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Others:

Frankenstein Psycho Lightyear S5 Episode 13: Farah Jasmine Griffin: Censoring the American Canon S5 Episode 12: Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Billy Wilder Three Days of the Condor Jason Bourne franchise Ban on 52 Books in Largest Utah School District is a Worrisome Escalation of Censorship PEN America

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Anne Kniggendorf.

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Fascism Past and Present: Anthony Marra on What the Censorship of 1940s Hollywood and Italy Can Teach Us - Literary Hub