Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally said out loud what the Kremlin has been doing for months. Mobile internet can be switched off across Russian cities whenever security services want it switched off, and ordinary people will be told about it afterward, if at all.

Speaking at a government meeting last week, the Russian presidentaddressedthe wave of blackouts that have made daily life difficult for tens of millions of people.

His position is that the outages are justified, that informing the public in advance would help “criminals,” and that law enforcement gets the final word on when Russians can use their phones to check the news, pay for groceries, or call a taxi.

“Of course, if this is related to operational work to prevent terrorist attacks — and we know, unfortunately, we sometimes miss such attacks — the priority will always be to protect people’s safety,” Putin said.

The framing is the usual. Security is the justification, terrorism is the threat, and a vague category of necessity does the work of suspending access to a basic piece of modern infrastructure. Who decides what counts as operational necessity? The same agencies carrying out the shutdowns. There is no court order. No public notice. No opportunity to challenge the decision before the signal drops.

Authorities cut mobile internet in Moscow for nearly three weeks last month. They regularly do the same in other regions. The official rationale points to Ukrainian drones allegedly using cellular networks for guidance, which continues despite the blackouts. Monitoring groups say most Russian regions now face daily disruptions.

“Criminals, after all, hear everything and see everything. If some information reaches them, they will undoubtedly adjust their criminal behavior and their criminal plans,” Putin told the cabinet. Information about when the state will cut off communications is treated as a security secret that must be kept from the very people whose communications are being cut.

Notification after the fact is, in his view, acceptable. This is the procedural offer on the table. You lose access to the internet without warning, you have no ability to plan around it, you have no recourse while it is happening, and at some point afterward, the authorities might explain what happened.

When the state can switch off communications at any moment, for reasons it will not disclose until later, every business, every journalist, every ordinary user operates under the assumption that any given day could be one of the dark ones. People stop relying on digital tools for things that matter. It is a predictable consequence of unreviewable executive power over the information environment.

Russia has built a workaround of sorts. The government maintains what it calls “white lists,” a registry of permitted domestic services that remain accessible while the rest of the internet goes dark.

Source: Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!