For most Russians, the war in Ukraine is no more than a "special military operation".

At the start of the conflict, the Kremlin implemented draconian censorship laws that targeted any media operating outside its control. As a result, most independent journalists left the country, and a digital Iron Curtain was reinforced, blocking Russians from accessing unfiltered news and social media. Punishments for anyone challenging the Kremlin's disinformation narrative range from fines of $45,000 to up to 15 years in prison.

However, in early March, Russia lifted copyright laws in response to Western sanctions and essentially urged its citizens to download content from "enemy countries." This prompted us to wonder:

Could this be an opportunity for freedom of speech to prevail?

Could it provide a backdoor for Russians to access the truth that their government has silenced and forbidden?

As of March 7, 2022 the Russian government officially encouraged its citizens to pirate Western entertainment by decriminalizing intellectual property theft and lifting copyright laws, in a bid to counterattack the economic sanctions taken against the Federation following the invasion of Ukraine.

Using this as an opportunity to circumvent censorship in Russia, we launched Torrents of Truth: a coordinated cyber-offensive that turned P2P platforms into a mass information channel, enabling journalists to disguise their unfiltered reports on the Ukraine war as pirated torrents of movies, series, music, softwares and books. All turned into trojan horses for the Truth.

We closely monitored trends in Russia from Kinopoisk.ru (the Russian IMDB) and Yandex.ru. By analyzing which western blockbusters, series, software, and music were most searched and anticipated at the launch of our cyberoffensive, we curated a selection of torrents that we knew would generate maximum downloads.

In total, 21 torrents were uploaded across popular torrent platforms. Russians who were attempting to pirate content such as The Batman, Doctor Strange or Adobe Photoshop 2022 were greeted with a message, saying (in Russian) “This isn’t what you expected to see. But this is something that you should see. The truth.”

Each torrent camouflaged the unfiltered report of a journalist who witnessed the truth of the devastating war in Ukraine. At the end of the report, viewers were invited to open the ReadMe.txt file attached to the file package, containing sources of information, verified links, and tools to seek the truth.

The Torrents of Truth were disseminated on June 7, 2022, and are potentially infinitely operational.

Not getting banned or noticed was a delicate operation: that’s why we created dozens of fake accounts on Russian pirate sites to manually endorse our trojan horses with comments and likes. We even created fake torrent trackers like http://trutracker.xyz/ or http://torrus.co/ in order to reference them on Yandex (the Russian Google).

But to make these torrents popular we needed higher numbers of seeders. So we set up a swarm of seedboxes: 6 untraceable high-bandwidth servers located all across Europe that simulated human downloads, bringing our torrents up in the rankings.

We also called the rest of the world to help to boost our numbers of seeders. That’s why we invited anyone, anywhere outside the Russian Federation to assist in spreading the truth in Russia by downloading the torrents from their own computer.

Torrents of Truth has enabled 4 journalists to speak up about the truth of the war in Ukraine—providing them with an undercover channel to keep spreading unbiased, trustworthy news, in a country where TV and newspapers aren’t allowing it anymore.

We identified more than 22 thousand downloads completed from Russian IP addresses, from our own seedboxes. However, it’ impossible to measure the total downloads of the torrents as we curated a cascading effect encouraging everyone to spread the content further and further way beyond our own seedboxes.

That’s more than 22,500 Russian citizens who saw what was really happening in Ukraine for the first time. 22,500 possibilities for the truth to prevail and for people to change their opinion.

Despite the risks involved and all efforts made to silence them, the 4 journalists behind Torrents of Truth stood up against the Kremlin’s raging censorship.