Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

------

July 28, 1992, Moscow KGB 7th Directorate.

Lazi Bartomos walked into his new office.

The office was much larger than his basement in Minsk, with windows, heating, and a brand new workstation.

His new employee badge was on the table.

"The 16th Bureau of the KGB of the USSR"

Internet Information Security Protection Group

Team leader

Lazi Bartomos

Just as West Germany's "Office for the Protection of the Constitution" was not only responsible for protecting the constitution, and NATO, a defensive organization, was dedicated to offense, the Soviet Union's Internet information security protection group's mission was naturally not limited to protection.

Lazi's official job duties consist of two parts:

The first objective was to help train and establish the Soviet Union's cybersecurity forces. This included training technical personnel, developing security tools, testing the defense capabilities of major Soviet information systems, and patching vulnerabilities.

The second is to infiltrate the Western internet, steal technical data, and distribute ideological propaganda materials among Western citizens.

The Soviet Union’s cybersecurity forces expanded rapidly in the second half of 1992.

Lazi recruited his first group of people from technical forums across the Soviet Union. These tech enthusiasts were strikingly similar to Lazi himself: young, self-taught, not very successful in the formal education system but talented in the field of computers, active on forums, and usually living in less-than-ideal accommodations.

After being recruited, they undergo three months of training, learning the KGB's basic secrecy regulations, intelligence gathering methodologies, and the principle that "you can't tell anyone about anything you see or do here, not even your mother."

After completing their training, Soviet cybersecurity personnel began systematically penetrating domestic information nodes, government websites, and servers of military enterprises. They also regularly organized network attack and defense exercises. The results proved that Russian hackers were highly skilled, and those who could penetrate the cybersecurity system were all heavyweights. During the attack and defense exercises, some even used hijacking software to tamper with system information, forcibly overclocking computer CPUs and graphics cards, directly rendering several servers worth over $5000 unusable and incidentally causing a fire in the data center!

Because the Soviet Union's information infrastructure was far more widespread than that of any other country in the world, the Soviet Union had made rapid progress in computer technology.

Currently, in terms of CPU performance, the Soviet Union has reached parity with Intel's newly released Pentium processor. In terms of scale, the Soviet Union has completely monopolized the global mainframe computer market. Except for NATO, which requires key institutions to use domestically produced computers for "national security" reasons, Soviet mainframes, which are both cheap and high-performance, have been warmly welcomed around the world.

During several cyberattacks and defenses, the Soviet Union discovered numerous security vulnerabilities. Domestic companies could naturally implement firewall programs first, but abroad...

As a result, Soviet cyber security forces began to infiltrate the World Wide Web, which was gradually emerging in Western Europe and the United States.

Between 1992 and 1993, apart from the Soviet Union, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy—the number of websites was limited, security awareness was very low, and many university and research institution servers did not even have basic access control.

Initially influenced by the "Internet communist ideology" and liberal thought, the Western Internet was designed with an open philosophy: information flows freely and anyone can access it.

This openness makes it highly dynamic in academia and business, but also extremely vulnerable in terms of security.

Bartmore's team finally realized that the KGB had been bluffing them. Once they were outside the country, they discovered that it wasn't raining at all—infiltrating Western servers was much easier than infiltrating Soviet servers themselves!

Because the Soviet Union's economic automation system was designed with security in mind from the very beginning, after all, it was a national-level economic information system, while the servers of many Western universities and institutions never even considered that a mysterious organization would systematically attack them.

Cybersecurity is like the evolution of tank armor and armor-piercing projectiles. Having fought many high-end, heavily defended systems domestically, going to Western systems that are several versions behind is like a wolf among sheep. Close research cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western Europe allowed Soviet cybersecurity to easily use Western Europe as a springboard to extend its reach into American research institutions.

In 1993, analysts from the KGB's First Directorate responsible for foreign intelligence wrote a report after studying numerous domestic forums and early Western internet forums. The report's core conclusion was:

"The Internet is not only a tool for information transmission, but also an unprecedented propaganda platform that can directly influence the thoughts of millions of people. This platform will be even larger than newspapers and television."

Traditional propaganda, such as radio, newspapers, and television, all required going through a "channel," and channels could be controlled. If you wanted to broadcast a news story favorable to the Soviet Union on American television, you had to go through an American television network—that was impossible!

If you want to publish an article in a French newspaper, you first have to pass French publishing censorship, which is also very difficult.

But the internet is different. Anyone can create a webpage and publish any content on the internet, and anyone in the world with an internet connection can see it, as long as there is no censorship.

At that time, the Soviet Union had a much higher internet coverage rate than the West. Several years of OGAS construction and the popularization of the World Wide Web had brought the Soviet Union's internet population to several million, while the internet in the West was still limited to universities, research institutions and a small number of technology companies.

Ordinary Western citizens don't use the internet much; it's mostly professors, researchers, students, engineers—the elite of society.

What does this mean? Do you remember how South Africa was brought down by a color revolution led by the elite?

If the Soviet Union had distributed propaganda materials online, its direct audience would have been Western elites.

Professors, researchers, intellectuals, and technical experts... these are the opinion leaders in Western societies. Their views influence society from top to bottom through classroom lectures, papers, media columns, and policy recommendations!

If you can influence 10,000 Western professors, you indirectly influence millions of students.

If you can influence a thousand policy researchers in the West, you indirectly influence government decisions.

The power of the internet is greater than ten thousand atomic bombs!

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

In January 1993, the KGB launched an operation codenamed "Operation Horn".

The objective was to systematically distribute Soviet ideological propaganda materials onto the international internet, with a focus on the elites in Western Europe and the United States.

Having learned from the ways Soviet netizens received propaganda, the KGB's cyber army naturally wouldn't post slogans like "Long live communism! Imperialism will perish!"—such things would only invite ridicule.

The Soviet cyber army created numerous websites and discussion groups on the internet that appeared to be independent, unofficial, and academic in nature. These websites and discussion groups had neutral names, such as "International Economic Comparative Studies," "XX Social Policy Forum," and "Development Model Discussion," etc.

These forums frequently discuss topics related to the Soviet Union, such as comparing the prices of essential goods in the Soviet Union (converted to US dollars) with the prices of similar products in American supermarkets. Other topics include the housing allocation system, free healthcare, free education from kindergarten to university, and extremely low unemployment.

What about the United States? The aftershocks of the Great Depression are still lingering. Although the unemployment rate has fallen from its peak, it remains slightly above normal. Healthcare costs are suffocating the middle class, and college tuition is rising every year.

Operation Horn packaged this data into academic papers, policy analysis reports, and discussion topics, publishing them on websites that appeared academic. Then, by sharing links on Western university mailing lists and academic forums, they allowed it to naturally spread among the elite.

These materials are selectively authentic.

They only show the good side of the Soviet Union—low prices, free healthcare, free housing—and they don't mention the other side—queues, bureaucracy and corruption, and privileges for officials.

They only show the bad side of America—the Great Depression, unemployment, expensive healthcare, mortgage defaults. They don't mention the other side of America... well, compared to the current Soviet Union, it seems there's nothing to brag about except freedom.

The clarion call continues to expose the West's dark history. This requires absolutely no fabrication by the Soviet Union; the Cold War history of the West, especially the United States, is filled with numerous real, verifiable, and chilling scandals.

The classic Tuskegee syphilis experiments, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, involved nearly four hundred Black men who were deliberately deprived of treatment to observe the natural progression of syphilis. The subjects were unaware they were being used as experimental subjects. Even after penicillin had been proven to cure syphilis, the experiments continued for decades.

There was also Operation Ocean Droplets. In 1950, the U.S. Navy secretly released Serratia marcescens bacteria in the San Francisco Bay Area to test the diffusion patterns of biological weapons in urban environments. Hundreds of thousands of San Francisco residents unknowingly inhaled the bacteria, and many later died from infection.

...

P.S.: All of these things were revealed in post-Cold War declassifications, but were covered up during the Cold War "because they involved national security".

Operation Horn compiled these events into detailed materials with links to the original documents and published them on the internet. For Western intellectuals who were completely unaware of these events, the impact of this material was considerable.

If a professor reads detailed records on his computer about the US sending biological weapons to its own citizens, and can even see the names and stories of the victims, would his worldview be shaken?

Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least the next time he preaches about the "free world" in class, his voice might not be so confident.

The effects of Operation Horn gradually became apparent from the beginning to the end of 1993.

A subtle change has begun to emerge on the Western internet, especially in academic forums and discussion areas where intellectuals are active.

There are more posts discussing the Soviet Union now. And the tone is no longer uniformly one of evil imperial narrative. Some people are starting to say things like, "The Soviet Union actually did some things quite well," "If we look at the data without prejudice," and "Rationally, objectively, and neutrally speaking, setting aside ideological differences, perhaps our understanding of the Soviet Union is not comprehensive enough."

These voices did not all come from Soviet propaganda robots; many intellectuals teaching at Western universities began to question the state's anti-communist propaganda.

This was enough to make Washington nervous in the political climate of the Cold War.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

Washington, July 1993.

President Gephardt convened a congressional hearing. The topic of the hearing was "the threat of ideological infiltration of the United States by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact via the Internet, and countermeasures."

At the hearing, CIA and Department of Defense officials presented a wealth of evidence—websites that appeared academic but were actually planned and funded by the Soviet KGB, data circulating on Western academic forums, and the online dissemination of unearthed dirt on American history.

"The Soviet Union is using the internet as a new type of ideological weapon. Its target is our elite, who are being influenced by carefully crafted Soviet messages, and they will subsequently influence the broader free population!"

The report continued: "Moreover, much of the material released by the Soviet Union was factually accurate. It was selectively true, which made it extremely difficult to label as 'disinformation,' and our forced deletion of this material, in a sense, proved the veracity of Soviet propaganda."

After much deliberation, Gephardt finally made a decision.

On August 12, 1993, the United States began construction of the "Golden Wall" project.

The Golden Wall was an internet filtering system. Its function was to block US internet users from accessing websites of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact member states.

It deploys filtering equipment at its international internet exit nodes in the United States to check the destination address of every data packet. If the destination is a domain name of a Warsaw Pact country such as .su (Soviet Union), .dd (East Germany), .pl (Poland), or .cs (Czechoslovakia), it will be discarded directly.

Technically it's not particularly difficult. But politically... well, it's something that many Americans find unbelievable.

The United States, a country that enshrines "freedom of speech" and "freedom of information" in the First Amendment of its Constitution, is building a digital wall! It's locking its citizens inside the wall, preventing them from seeing certain things outside!

Conspiracy theorists (many of whom were later proven not to be conspiracy theorists) and critics immediately jumped in.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a protest: "The Golden Wall project is a blatant violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution! The government has no right to decide what American citizens can and cannot read!"

The academic community was outraged, with hundreds of university professors signing a joint letter of protest. Many of them were using academic websites from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries to conduct legitimate research and secretly build their own governments.

Even some conservative lawmakers are uncomfortable: The US is building a firewall? When did the US become a country that needs to build a wall to protect its ideology?

Gephard withstood the pressure, stating at a press conference: "This is a national security measure. The Soviet Union is exploiting our openness to attack us, and we have the right to protect our people from extremist ideologies!"

In the context of the Cold War, any opposition or complaints from citizens regarding national policies or a particular political figure could be silenced by the word "national security."

The Golden Wall project went live on September 12, 1993, and from that day onward, the United States temporarily could not access any websites of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies.

Brussels, August 27, 1993.

The NATO summit was held. In addition to the usual military cooperation topics, an unprecedented new issue emerged on the summit's agenda—

"How to restrict the spread of 'harmful ideologies and propaganda materials' on the Internet."

You might as well just name the Soviet Union.

The US representative briefed NATO allies on the experience and rationale behind the Golden Wall project. President Gephardt suggested that NATO member states should establish unified internet filtering standards to block ideological infiltration from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact throughout NATO.

Due to family circumstances, there will be no update today.

A problem started yesterday... My dad's tumor recurred before his surgery, so he had to have another surgery, but the wound healed very poorly. Yesterday it got so bad that he had to be hospitalized again and is currently in the hospital... The only good news so far is that the tumor hasn't recurred a third time. I have to stay with him today, so I can only update once a day for at least this week. There was no update today.

Chapter 132: Britain turned 1984 into a disaster.

At President Gephardt's call, the Iron Curtain of the Cold War descended upon the internet world.

France, as the most assertive and independent member of NATO, symbolically agreed to the US demands. On September 19, 1993, the French government issued an elegantly worded statement indicating that France "understands and respects the concerns of its allies regarding information security" and that France would "take appropriate measures to prevent external ideological infiltration while safeguarding the freedom of information of its citizens."

In layman's terms, it means we'll install a filtering system, but we won't actually use it.

France's filtering system was indeed installed at several major international internet exit points. However, the system's filtering list was extremely limited—the Mitterrand government only blocked a few official propaganda websites of the Soviet Union and its allies, while allowing academic websites, forums, and other civilian websites from Warsaw Pact countries to pass freely.

French professors were hardly affected—they could still access the Soviet Academy of Sciences' database of papers and engage in political discussions on online forums without any interference. For the French, whether or not the official website of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was blocked was really meaningless.

Because the Soviet Union focused its propaganda efforts on major academic and non-governmental forums.

Mitterrand knew perfectly well that France would not sacrifice its information sovereignty for Washington's fears. The French internet belongs to France, not NATO! If France were to coordinate information control with the United States, who would define what information is free and what information is communist?

The right to define this is definitely not in France's hands; France will never allow Americans to arbitrarily infringe upon the French people's freedom of information!

Canada, Japan, and West Germany expressed their support, following the US lead. Canada deployed a filtering system, while West Germany's measures were more stringent, with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution extending its reach to the internet, aggressively deleting posts, banning comments, and establishing sensitive keywords.

Japan's situation is rather unique—the development of the internet in Japan was slow after the bursting of the bubble economy, and the number of people who could access the internet was already small, so whether or not it was blocked had little impact.

But what truly astonished its allies was the UK. At the height of its internet censorship, the UK even banned its citizens from accessing foreign internet—including NATO allies. Individuals were not allowed to access the internet privately and had to log in to their accounts on officially designated computers.

NATO's hostile attitude toward the internet drew the ire of many tech enthusiasts and netizens in China. In October 1993, almost a week after NATO countries completely blocked the Warsaw Pact internet, John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, developed SWIPE (Software IP Encryption Protocol). This was the first protocol to encrypt and authenticate data packets at the IP layer, and it was the foundation of VPN technology.

Every country has many computer whizzes. In just one week, American geeks took the lead in perfecting and releasing the VPN program, which quickly spread on domestic forums. Soviet informants in the United States immediately noticed this technology and sent the data packets back to the Union. Subsequently, the Soviet cybersecurity department improved the protocol and supported the establishment of VPN companies in neutral countries to provide circumvention services to the West.

In late November 1993, Austria and Switzerland, two neutral countries, added a lucrative new business – online proxy services.

The online proxies in these two countries have different business focuses: Austria leans towards academics, while Switzerland leans towards business.

Austria established the first 64kbps TCP/IP leased line through the University of Vienna, connecting to the global Internet.

Vienna, a geographical crossroads of East and West, has now become a crossroads on the internet, a "Checkpoint Charlie on the information Berlin Wall," with the NATO internet and the Warsaw Pact internet physically interconnected through Austria's network infrastructure.

PS: Checkpoint Charlie was the main border checkpoint for non-Germans to pass through East and West Berlin during the Cold War. Several confrontations between the US and the Soviet Union took place here, such as the 1961 Berlin Crisis.

Switzerland, due to its tradition of banking secrecy, has taken over the intermediary business of Western banks. The Cold War Iron Curtain falling on the Internet cannot stop capitalists from making money. Banks in Western Europe and the United States have varying degrees of economic exchanges with Warsaw Pact countries, and Internet transactions cannot be an obstacle!

Switzerland has openly refused to provide user access records to NATO governments, but whether there are any dirty deals behind the scenes is a matter of opinion.

Thus, after obtaining VPN programs circulating privately on forums through various means, many people in NATO countries purchased international internet access services from Austria and Switzerland to bypass internet restrictions.

Now, if a British university student wants to access a Warsaw Pact website, although he cannot connect directly, he can first connect to a proxy server in Vienna, which will then access the Warsaw Pact website on his behalf and send the content back.

However, the British government quickly discovered that its citizens had violated the National Secrets Act and immediately imposed heavy penalties on agents within the UK. Some tech enthusiasts who spread VPN technology were even imprisoned.

In February 1994, the UK enacted the National Communications Security Act, which prohibited citizens from accessing the international internet without permission from the National Communications Security Committee and temporarily shut down all domestic internet facilities for rectification. During this period, British citizens were unable to access any foreign websites, including those of NATO allies.

In March, a scandal was revealed by an "unnamed source" who said that the UK was collecting citizens' internet speech data on a large scale for surveillance and censorship, and that citizens' information was being viewed at will.

Even France couldn't stand it anymore. Mitterrand hoped that the British Hesselting government would "embody the spirit of democracy and freedom," and he directly quoted a derogatory term circulating on the internet for this behavior by Britain:

Oceania

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

To understand why Britain had reached this point in 1993, we must first look at what had happened in Britain in the preceding years.