Twitter, Facebook Strike Leads Back To Russia, Georgia

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LIANE HANSEN, host:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Liane Hansen.

Facebook and Twitter came under a cyber attack this week, interrupting service to 45 million Twitter users alone. To some it was merely annoying; to others disconcerting. But there is a political back story that goes way beyond Silicon Valley.

Joining us now to help sort it out is Evgeny Morozov. He's a blogger for Foreign Policy. He's in the studio. Welcome to the program.

Mr. EVGENY MOROZOV (Blogger, Foreign Policy): Hi, thanks for having me.

HANSEN: The subject of the attack was one person, and I think you've referred to him as the first - is it the first digital refugee?

Mr. MOROZOV: That's right.

HANSEN: Tell us about him.

Mr. MOROZOV: Well, he is a blogger. He was actually from Apazia(ph), from one of the breakaway republics of Georgia. And he was real refugee because he had to flee Apazia in the first Georgian war in the early '90s. And since then he has taken to blogging to express his nostalgia for the times that passed and to blog about Georgian politics.

Last year he emerged as one of the more stringent critics of the war that was happening between Georgia and Russia in Sousa city, another breakaway region. And his blogging was wrangling so many people, I guess, in Russia or could people close to the Kremlin - that his blog became a subject of very frequent cyber attacks, which basically made it impossible for his readers to access the blog and for him to blog and post any new posts.

And he was doing it on, first, on one site, Live Journal, which is a very popular blogging platform in Russia. Then he diversified. As his Live Journal blog became a frequent target of attacks, he moved to Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other platforms - and attacks followed him there.

So, as we have seen this week on the anniversary of the Russian-Georgian war of last year, you know, all of his accounts on different social media sites became targets. The attacks were so severe that the entire service was actually unavailable. So, it's not only him, it's other, you know, 44 million people who use Twitter, who became hostages in this cyber attack.

HANSEN: Any indication that this was a part of that geopolitical battle, for example, that the hackers could've come from the Kremlin?

Mr. MOROZOV: Well, it makes for a very plausible explanation. However, it's very hard right now to second guess because you never know who benefitted most. You know, this blogger himself suddenly became a celebrity. Georgia is also benefiting as a country because suddenly people are talking about this obscure war, which few people remember about this. And it's real hard to see what exactly Kremlin itself and the Russian politicians would actually gain from it. Because what he was doing was punditry. It wasn't investigative reporting and it wasn't breaking news stories that would somehow undermine the Kremlin's position on the war.

So it's real hard to guess who benefit most from it. What we know is that we don't know who was behind the attacks and there is no way to trace it at this point.

HANSEN: The fact that this one man caused this ripple effect throughout two systems - Twitter and Facebook - what are the chances that Twitter and Facebook might say to this blogger, you can't use our site anymore because of all the attacks against you, and we can't handle it?

Mr. MOROZOV: I think right now with him generating headlines all over the media, it's very unlikely that Live Journal and Facebook will proceed to do that. But they think there are many other examples like him which are much less visible. Many of them are, you know, not as political as he is.

For example, we have all sorts of groups fighting for, again, lesbian rights, for example. Have all sorts of dissident groups from Burma who are also frequent subjects of cyber attacks, and they're being forced off their online platforms because they cause a lot of havoc to their companies who host them, but they bring very little profit. So there is this very big problem how to preserve freedom of expression online in the future.

HANSEN: Evgeny Morozov writes the Net Effect blog for Foreign Policy. Thanks for coming in.

Mr. MOROZOV: Thanks so much for having me.

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