On the mat of the Capitol riots two weeks ago, a number of major tech companies pulled support for Parler, a Twitter-like social network that Donald Trump supporters have increasingly favored since its launch in 2018. Apple and Google removed the Parler application from its digital stores, and Amazon Web Services has cut hosting services from the platform. After more than a week offline, the site is now partially back, in the form of a landing page that promises a total return. To get here, Parler hired DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company, to defend it against the endless flood of attacks that virtually all sites face online – especially those as controversial as Parler.
DDoS-Guard told WIRED that it is only providing defense against denial of service attacks, not hosting Parler’s website. But even that level of support requires access to all traffic that flows through Parler, so that he can “clean up” the malicious traffic that aims to overwhelm the site. Given the Russian government’s active efforts to isolate the country’s internet and gain access to all data, Parler can expose its users to Russian surveillance if the site is ever fully restarted with DDoS-Guard.
“Now it seems to be the right time to remind all of you – lovers and haters – why we started this platform”, proclaims Parler’s homepage. “We believe that privacy is paramount and freedom of expression is essential … We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome them back soon.”
Parler’s chief operating officer, Jeffrey Wernick, said The New York Times on Tuesday, that the social network prefers suppliers based in the USA and is working to find them. The platform registered its domain through Epik, based in Seattle. But while Parler has been rejected by the biggest names in the U.S. tech industry, he aims to have more than 12 million users, making the platform too big for most small hosts. Therefore, their domestic options are scarce.
By adopting DDoS-Guard, even as a stopgap, Parler joins a growing list of far-right sites like 8kun (formerly 8chan) and the Daily Stormer that US infrastructure companies have taken offline, just to see companies in countries with limited internet freedom – such as DDoS-Guard – allow their resurgence.
“At the moment, Parler.com does not violate our Acceptable Use Policy or current US legislation, as far as we know,” DDoS-Guard said in a statement to WIRED. “DDoS-Guard maintains customer data responsibly, without disclosing it to third parties. In addition, the provider stores only the information necessary for the service and explicitly provided by customers. “
But Russia passed laws mandating technology companies to comply with government requests and has deployed physical network infrastructure to monitor everything from IP addresses for web users and communications to location data. The use of Russian infrastructure services can expose users of a website to the country’s surveillance schemes, says Alp Toker, director of the non-partisan connectivity tracking group NetBlocks. Most posts on Parler are public, but the platform also offers a direct message feature and several types of “verified” accounts, including red badges for anyone who uploads an image of their government ID card. All of this information, as well as granular user activity data and user IP addresses, would potentially be exposed to the Kremlin if Parler returned with these same resources while routing his data through Russian servers.
Regardless of where Parler finally arrives, it seems likely that he will find a home somewhere. The decentralized design of the Internet helps ensure connectivity, but it also makes it difficult to prevent people or platforms from being silenced. Even repressive governments in countries like Iran and China have struggled with the logistics of fully controlling a regional internet.