Move over, Thailand – here comes Russia looking to claim the title as the most technologically advanced censorship machine.

Today Russia is launching its “single register” of banned websites (which can be viewed here), which solves the previous inconvenience of each region decided which sites to ban.  Now the “great firewall of Russia” has gone national.

What is interesting about Russia’s new internet monitoring protocol – and part of the reason why there are deep concerns that it will impede free speech – is that their advanced filtration system will do more than just read the headers of data packets, and instead will conduct “deep packet inspection” to closely monitor communications.

Writing in Wired, experts Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan explain it much better than I can: