So at first few words on what’s going on… Since 6th of January all businesses are required to have their services for Belarus citizens hosted on Belorussian servers. All ISP’s and internet-cafes are ordered to gather all data about their customers and logs from their usage of internet.
It’s quite obvious that the biggest businesses will do it. But we cannot say that for smaller ones having casual customers from Belarus (shops and other services). So they’ll basically have to shut down the access for Belarus citizens which gives us the same result as site blocking, but (I really hate to say this) done right (meaning not via DNS blocking which is still bad). For now we cannot say for sure how hard this law is going to be used, and if and which businesses are going to respect it. As we’re said punishment for breakin’ it won’t be so big for them (as in scale). One thing is sure, that bringing those services to Belorussian servers will make them really easy to shut down if it’s necessary.
For now we plan to help Belorussians get more accurate privacy means. Give them a LiveCD Linux distribution ready to use with Tor, OTR encryption and i2p implemented. So far we’ve decided to base this solution on Tails. Another way is to produce a pre-configured package for MS Windows implementing solutions mentioned earlier. We also want to translate a great brochure A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PROTECTING YOUR IDENTITY AND SECURITY ONLINE AND WHEN USING MOBILE PHONES into Russian and Belorussian.
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We are still trying to get a better understanding of the situation, yesterday Kasia has provided as a great translation of the new law into Polish which has given us few new goals, we’re workin’ now on an accurate English translation. If you feel like helping, please do so.
You can find all current goals, proposed solutions, information on current situation and progress on our public pad: pad.telecomix.org/belarus.
