Ukraine Invasion Seen Showing Dangers of Data Localization

ASPEN, Colo. -- Governments’ prioritization of data localization turns out to be a bad idea in times of crisis, with vital government data one of the early Russian targets in its invasion of Ukraine, tech security experts said Tuesday at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum. A panel on Ukrainian connectivity focused repeatedly on the need for rebuilding the country's communications networks to use providers not controlled by authoritarian regimes. Ruth Berry, acting deputy assistant secretary, State Department's Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, said there's wide agreement there's not enough diversity and resilience in the telecom network supply chain, which is why Open RAN is such an imperative.

The Ukrainian invasion has shown that sensitive government data needs to be secured but not necessarily locally, said Berry. Without backup copies or the data replicable elsewhere, government continuity of operations is at risk, she said. She said the fact Russia rerouted data and internet traffic through its territory in areas it now occupies shows the lengths authoritarian regimes will go to censor and surveil.

Microsoft migrated numerous Ukrainian government agencies to the cloud in a few weeks after Russia's Feb. 24 invasion, said Cristin Goodwin, Microsoft associate general counsel. That migration came only after President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law, which ended a legal prohibition against the government using the cloud, she said. Russia was "certainly going for” a cataclysmic cyber Pearl Harbor attack at the invasion’s outset, Goodwin said. “They threw everything they had, shock and awe, and that didn’t happen.”

Russia’s early attacks on Ukrainian internet connectivity were more successful than publicly reported, with connectivity dramatically slower than before the invasion, said Jamil Jaffer, director of George Mason University's National Security Law & Policy Program. There also have been some spillover effects of the attacks, which shows the importance of hardening U.S. allies' facilities, he said. He said the role of the U.S. private sector has been huge, citing Starlink and the demonetization or content moderation actions taken by YouTube and Facebook. Goodwin said Ukraine's resiliency was aided hugely by SpaceX's Starlink satellite connectivity and by the cloud.

Russia didn't deliberately target telecom infrastructure in the early days of the invasion, perhaps because it expected to use networks in occupied territory, said Olga Boichak, digital cultures lecturer at Australia's University of Sydney. That was a misstep because it let Ukrainians mobilize resistance, she said. She said Russia's rerouting of Ukrainian data flows through Russian networks and blocking access to social media and Ukrainian media is historically unprecedented.

Aspen Notebook

Much as the 2016 presidential election marked an end to an era of maximized internet freedom due to concerns about misleading content and bots, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs abortion decision seems likely to be the start of a new era of a Balkanized internet in the U.S., said Matt Perault, director-University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center on Technology Policy. He said there’s a possibility different states adopt different rules on what types of information must be or can't be hosted, such as information about accessing an abortion. He said Dobbs is causing a flip politically, with Democrats increasingly concerned about online censorship, and Republicans who had pushed for common carrier provisions for the internet now seeking removal of abortion content.

Noting widespread misunderstanding in the U.S. about the First Amendment, University of Tennessee-Knoxville Professor-Media Management and Law Stuart Brotman urged a more vigorous free speech culture. Maybe the First Amendment should be recited at sporting events alongside with singing the “Star Spangled Banner” or shown on screen before movies in theaters, he said. Brotman said if the 5th and 11th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals split on legal challenges to the Florida and Texas social media platform viewpoint discrimination laws, the Supreme Court is likely to take up the cases and find the laws unconstitutional.