Cyber partisans: the future of nonviolent protest in Belarus

Amidst political turmoil a hacker resistance movement arose to challenge the country’s 26-year-old regime.

Source: Jana Shnipelson on Unsplash

The presidential elections in Belarus on August 9 saw the long-running ruler Aleksander Lukashenko successfully defend his heavyweight champion belt, but the result was deemed fabricated and unjust by many critics. Lukashenko, whose title of Europe’s last dictator is now less believable than it once was, faced an ongoing wave of protests with as many as 100,000 dissatisfied citizens rallying on the streets of Minsk.

Riot police has been deployed to decisively suppress organised protest and violence was readily utilised. Police have officially confirmed the death of three people during the August events, including one caused by a gunshot wound to the head. 

While demonstrating the presidential administration’s willingness and intention to use force to stay in power, the violence has been limited when compared to the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, where one hundred lives were taken in the span of just five days. Most importantly, the protesters sparsely resisted pressure and no significant attempts at organised action were taken, in contrast to the events in Kyiv, where the headquarters of the president’s party were seized by protesters.

The nonviolent nature of Belarusian protest leaves the country in a potential gridlock. While Lukashenko is openly displaying his strongman intentions, having been filmed exiting a helicopter with an assault rifle in his hands, the opposition has resorted to means like bringing pumpkins to the presidential residence (a Belarusian tradition involving ladies rolling out a pumpkin to a bothersome and unwanted admirer). Violence towards the police did occur, with reports of pyrotechnics and even Molotov cocktails being used against the law enforcement in particular cases. However, some of those allegations are controversial, with the Ministry of the Interior originally reporting that the first victim of the riots, Andrey Taraykovskiy, has died due to malfunction of an explosive he was carrying, but it is now believed that he was shot by the riot police without an explosive in his hands. 

Having been bullied out of any possibility for lawful protest action the anti-Lukashenko faction has been left unable to seize power old-school, on the streets, in the spirit of the French Revolution. The public which rallied against the existing regime is, quite understandably, unprepared for a Molotov-throwing jump-under-a-tank revolution and is thus left with non-violent methods of protest. As the most recent example of Russian Khabarovsk showed even months-long protests with numerous people out on the streets could remain fruitless.

So far, Belarusians have turned not to the history of nonviolent resistance inspired by UCL’s very own Mahatma Gandhi or Leo Tolstoy, but to new technology. On September 19 and 20, the personal details of 2,000 members of the Belarusian police forces were published by a Telegram channel NEXTA in an act of defacing – revealing one’s true identity online. This has allegedly resulted in 200 of the affected employees resigning, leading many to believe that online resistance could be a realistic tool in the unfolding struggle. 

Those details have been obtained through actions of an unknown group called the Cyber Partisans. The same group claimed responsibility for disruptions in the information systems of national customs and hacking bill-printing software to add messages with threats of police lustration. Cyber partisans have vowed to continue “pressuring” Lukashenko’s regime by publishing personal details and in a recent brief interview their representative has claimed that the state-owned news agency BelTA will soon be under partisans’ control. On September 29 the online stream of Belarus Telecom channel 1 was interrupted with footage of police brutality and violence against protesters.

For sympathisers of the cyber partisans there are some concerns whether they can pack a punch or are just flexing muscles. Andrey Lankin, an IT-specialist and head of one of the 2020 election campaigns has pointed towards weakness of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on online government resources, as the state has total control over the external internet traffic to Belarus and would disallow attempts to flood systems’ bandwidth. However, such attacks are a primitive method of cyber warfare. With the recent strike on the state telecom network and claims that multiple supporters on the inside are infiltrating the national systems it seems that the scale of the online offensive is growing. 

Critics point to moral and legal ambiguities of hacktivists’ action. Particularly, publishing classified personal details of state employees is a crime and cases like Wikileaks’ Julian Assange could be seen as examples of similar action being persecuted elsewhere in the world. Additionally, there is no specific evidence to suggest that the officers whose personal information got disclosed were involved in any of the crimes the hackers are trying to avenge. However, cyber partisans are in many ways using the attacks as a bargaining chip against Lukashenko and his administration. This is an ambiguous topic as autocratic regimes, by their nature, abuse power and administrative resources to control the legal field, thus forcing an unlawful response. In this light, cyber crime like defacing could be seen as a less violent alternative to rioting. While leaving space for ethical debate, this highlights the importance of the role played by alternative dimensions of protest action. Having been outgunned politically and on the streets, some Belarusians turned to their keyboards. 

To further understand some of the ambiguities about online resistance, we shall turn our attention to the platform where the personal details data dump took place, and coincidentally the media center of opposition – the Telegram channel NEXTA. It covers political news in Belarus and also serves as an aggregator of user-suggested messages, particularly with footage of police brutality incidents and movements of the protesters. Off the back of a huge spike in viewership following the presidential election, NEXTA became the most followed Russian-speaking Telegram channel in the world with over two million readers. Recently, it has grown from a mass media outlet to more of a political organisation, openly stating that their aim is to fight the existing regime in Belarus and to educate the population of the regime’s supposed crimes. 

NEXTA could be characterised, and more so recently, by non-neutral language towards Lukashenko, members of the government, the police and other state structures and employees, who are openly mocked and insulted. The team is comprised of Belarusians living in Poland, some for many years. Due to this, doubters, including Artemy Lebedev – a prominent designer and the author of a popular opinion news show – have pointed out the possibility of NEXTA being influenced by the Polish secret services. While being the version that Lukashenko himself heavily promotes, not lastly by publishing a fake “intercepted” tape of Polish and German secret service agents discussing intervention into Russian and Belarusian internal politics, it is indeed possible that some members of the editorial team could be recruited or supported by the Polish secret services to topple the Belarusian government. The Polish government sponsors the Belarusian House accommodation in Warsaw where the team resides. 

It is rare that a country gets a chance to escape the sweet embrace of a stale political system and it is even rarer that it has the power to do so and the circumstances fall favourably. It is likely that Lukashenko will seek a peaceful transition of power during his new term for which he has secretly inaugurated himself on September 23, but the pressure is on. The dissatisfied citizens, the opposition media, the shunned candidates, the cyber partisans and perhaps even the Polish secret service are pushing for the quick demise of the Lukashenko Leviathan. It will not fall easy and it will not fall unnoticed as all the Belarusian neighbours watch on eagerly, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has supported his old vis-a-vis Lukashenko with $1.5 billion and riot police, but it is clear that the potential for nonviolent protest online has not yet been fully realised. The suggested routes forward for the cyber partisans are plenty - defacing and data leaks, disruption to national web systems and state mass media, attacking hardware or even creating a peer-to-peer payment system to crash the Belarusian tax and finance structures, as some propose. 

Cyberspace is becoming the new battlefield for political struggle globally, especially with the introduction of face-recognising video surveillance on the streets and growing importance of information warfare online. We have seen hackers turn activist before, with global networks like the Anonymous or local, more goal-oriented, political hacktivists in Ukraine in 2014, and we widely discuss hackers’ election interference, particularly in the U.S., but the future holds many opportunities for the cyber warfare to play a decisive role in world politics and there is plenty to learn from what unfolds in Belarus before our eyes.

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