In an open video address to Prime Minister Vladmir Putin, Alexei Dymovsky says, "Maybe you don't know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I'm ready to tell you everything. I'm not scared of my own death." How much does Dymovsky have to fear? The answer might surprise those of us who are accustomed to the relative freedoms of self-expression.

Dymovsky served in the Russian army from 1996 until 1998. After that, he worked as a district commissioner of the city police in the Amur region. In 2004, he was transferred to the city of Novorossiysk police department, where he eventually advanced to the post of senior security officer and oversaw crimes related to drug trafficking.

"We are working as hard as we can with all our souls," Dymovsky says. After referencing losing two wives, who refused to put up with his work, and problems with "relationships with the bosses," Dymovsky says, "I want to talk about it now." He speaks of being denied leave of absence or medical treatment for illness, about police taking bribes and about pervasive corruption. "I am not afraid," he says, "I am telling my name... But I cannot stand detecting the nonexistent crimes, imprisoning people who are not guilty. I can't stand it anymore."

Take a look at one of the videos Dymovsky has posted so far:

These videos bear significant political impact, but they also speak to the importance of the Internet in acting as our generation's soapbox. Any wronged person has an almost infinite capacity to express, persuade and convince. Currently, a source at the Russian Interior Ministry's internal security department has confirmed to at least one publication that representatives of several human rights organization actively support Dymovsky.

The officers mentioned in Dymovsky's reports have filed libel suits against him, and the Russian interior minister has said his office is investigating the former police officer's claims.

They were all victims of a denial of service attack that was, depending on who you believe, either the work of Russian nationalist hackers targeting a Georgian economist, a clever ploy by the United Economists of Georgia to garner sympathy by feigning an attack by Russian nationalist hackers, or an attempt by Paramount Pictures to divert attention from reviews of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Yet we all made it (including countless girl's-name-plus-random-four-digits Twitter spam accounts... oh, how I missed you lot these past few days). I'll let you know where to get your "I Survived the Twitter DoS Attack of 2009" t-shirts shortly.

After all, did you know who Cyxymu was when you woke up yesterday? Speaking to the Guardian earlier today, Cyxymu argued that the Russian government was directly responsible for these attacks against him, though while this makes for a good headline, chances are that the reality is far more prosaic.

Cyxymu on the Net: A Digital Refugee

These attacks, which affected some of the Internet's most popular sites, seem oddly out of proportion. On Twitter, Cyxymu had only about 600 friends earlier today - though that number is now up over 800 and growing as his name becomes more widely known. His main LiveJournal account only got between 1000 and 1500 unique visitors per day over the last few months (though Cyxymu moved from service to service, so it's hard to pinpoint exact numbers).

Evgeny Morozov currently offers the best discussion of who Cyxymu is and why he might have been the target of this attack. You can find his post on the Foreign Policy magazine's Net Effect blog (it's a long read, but worth it). Morozov describes Cyxymu as the first "digital refugee," who had already faced DDOS attacks on his LiveJournal and Wordpress.com blog last year. Morozov discounts the idea that Cyxymu will mostly profit from these attacks thanks to the Streisand effect and that his message will now be heard by far more people than before the attacks. We are not quite sure about that, however, especially given that Cyxymu has started to give media interviews now.

Was the Kremlin Behind these Attacks?

Given that Cyxymu already faced similar attacks in the past, it only makes sense to assume that these new attacks were also meant to silence or intimidate him (though clearly this never worked before). We do wonder, however, if this was really an attack launched by the Russian government. While the results of the attack were far-reaching, DDOS attacks are sadly nothing unusual on the net - and sometimes they are even used as a way to extort money from online businesses. It doesn't take a government to start a DDOS attack, and lots of spammers and hackers probably have the ability to launch an attack of this scale.

In his Guardian interview, Cyxymu says that the attack may have been "carried out by ordinary hackers but I'm certain the order came from the Russian government." Indeed, this is a possibility and it's still too early to really know. For the time being, though, we are not fully convinced yet that a government organization was really behind this attack.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.

Context

Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.

Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.

The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.

Freedom of speech advocates in Russia call the extremism laws too vague and sweeping, arguing that they are open for abuse by government officials. Last year, Russian news site www.gazeta.ru was warned for extremism after writing about political cartoons that satirized the prophet Mohammed.

Suprisingly, surveys show that many Russians actually favor government control of the media. A 2005 study found that 82% of Russians were in favor of censorship on television, though generally that referred to the removal of "ethically questionable" material (such as sex or violence) rather than the supression of free political thought. It should be noted that Article 29 of the Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.

"It is a worry whenever the government tries to change any law," Oleg Panfilov, director of the Centre of Journalism in Extreme Situations, told the AFP. "It is difficult to find anyone who is not against extremism but it depends on how the law is used. The government uses (it) selectively."

A 2007 report on press freedom from Freedom House (PDF) rated Russia as "not free" and noted that specifically the atmosphere of press freedom had decline under President Vladimir Putin. That's a trend that seems to have continued in 2008 and begun to spread toward the realm of government Internet censorship. A couple of months ago, it was reported that Russian ISPs were "testing" filters and blocking a few major opposition party news web sites.