Turkmenistan: special services identify schoolchildren who use VPN apps

According to independent sources in Turkmenistan, the persecution of those, who use VPN services to obtain information, has intensified in the country, and underage schoolchildren are among the persecuted.

Directors, heads of the teaching department and teachers, together with employees of the Ministry of National Security, are searching and catching students who provide services for installing VPN applications. According to the sources, the employees of the Ministry of National Security work under the guise of representatives of Turkmen provider TM CELL “Altyn Asyr”. Pupils are called to the office of director or head of the teaching department, and there they are interrogated about their communication and digital skills.

The schools’ inspections have become systemic. Smartphones are confiscated from pupils and checked for the content of VPN applications in them, and teachers also are subject to verification. For the installed VPN application, pupils and their parents are threatened with expulsion from school, fines, dismissal of parents from work and imprisonment of parents. Teachers are given fines and a final warning, followed by dismissal and criminal prosecution. Employees of state institutions are also subject to verification.

Teachers and pupils use VPN services to download educational material (lecture notes, tables, formulas, theorems, etc.). The authorities of the country tightly control the Internet and many educational sites are blocked. Teachers run the risk of being unemployed due to downloading school and other programs for teaching their students. Many parents complain that the quality of school programs has deteriorated during the last 3-4 years, and their children don’t receive the necessary level of knowledge.

The VPN applications are used by a huge number of people in the country, including the employees of the Ministry of National Security.

It’s worth noting that all social networks, educational sites, independent media and all sites, which were criticizing the government of Turkmenistan, are blocked in Turkmenistan.