We all know that Russia has a reputation for being an expert in cybercrime, from everyday garden variety piracy through to high-level cyberattacks (about which, according to recent reports, NATO should be concerned).  In Forbes today, Andy Greenberg looks at the new findings of a book called ‘Access Controlled’, written by a consortium of academics focused on free speech and government interactions with the Internet.  The book, he says, suggests that Russia is employing a plethora of tactics to control the dissemination of information through the internet:

But while states like Russia and Belarus perform much less of what the ONI calls “first generation” or “Chinese-style” filtering, they’re increasingly adept at “second and third generation” control of the Web.

“Second generation” censorship, as ONI authors Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski define it in an early chapter, includes tricks like requiring Web site owners to register with the government and using the process to weed out dissident sites with red tape, a tactic often used in Kazakhstan and Belarus. In Belarus and Uzbekistan, “veracity” and slander laws are used as a pretense for shutting down dissident sites.

Public safety and security have also been used as excuses to block sites at moments of political importance, such as the censoring of the BBC in Armenia’s 2008 elections, ostensibly aimed at preventing violence in local demonstrations. Or countries will use distributed denial of service attacks to flood sites with data requests and shut them down at key moments, what the ONI coins “just-in-time” censorship.