Russian Duma Passes Internet Censorship Bill

[American Patriot]

• July 11, 2012, 3:04 p.m. ET

Russian Duma Passes Internet Censorship Bill


By LUKAS I. ALPERT

MOSCOW—Russia's parliament Wednesday passed a controversial bill allowing the government to block blacklisted websites, which critics warn could ultimately be used to crack down on dissent.
The Russian state Duma, or lower house of parliament, approved the bill unanimously on the second and third readings after four amendments were inserted that substantially narrowed the criteria under which the government could shut down a site deemed harmful to the public good.
In the days running up to the parliamentary debate, the bill sparked widespread protest from the operators of popular websites and rights activists, who said it was a thinly veiled attempt at government censorship like that seen in China.
Yet in parliament, even prominent opposition lawmakers supported the bill, saying that the legislation actually represented a welcome step.
Ilya Ponomarev, a usually outspoken anti-Kremlin critic, argued that Russia had become a "hotbed for cyber crime," after years without any laws regulating the Internet and that the bill was needed.
"I understand my point of view is unlikely to be particularly popular on the web, but I believe that such a law is needed," Mr. Ponomarev wrote on his blog. "I urge people not to succumb to mass psychosis."
He argued that the bill had been improved by removing the vague reference to "harmful content" when describing the type of sites that could be targeted.
The bill now heads to the Federation Council, Russia's upper house, where it is expected to pass. It will then head to President Vladimir Putin's desk to be signed into law.
Supporters of the bill say the proposed change to the country's information legislation is only intended to target child pornography and similarly questionable sites. Opponents warn that it could be used to shut down sites deemed unfavorable by the government.
Several popular websites staged protests Tuesday against the law's passage, with the Russian-language version of Wikipedia taking itself offline for 24 hours and replacing its home page with the message "Imagine a world without free knowledge."
Russian Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said Wednesday that the bill would undergo further adjustments in the fall and only then would the criteria for regulating websites be formulated.
"Fighting child pornography should not infringe Internet freedoms," Mr. Nikiforov insisted.
The Internet has become an important alternative source of information in a country where government-controlled television stations dominate. A recent wave of large-scale, anti-Kremlin protests have been largely organized on the web.
The bill comes amid a series of government moves that have been viewed as efforts to clamp down on the opposition, including another controversial bill that would force nongovernmental organizations that receive money from foreign donors to register as foreign agents. The bill is slated for a second reading in the Duma by Friday.
On Tuesday, Mr. Putin proposed exempting religious and charitable organizations under the NGO law and promised to increase Russian government contributions to such groups.

[American Patriot]

We've been warning the world for years about the Russians.

This is the rise of Communism, again

[American Patriot]

http://en.ria.ru/society/20120710/174509543.html

Russian Wikipedia Goes on Strike Over Censorship Plans

Russian Wikipedia's homepage is currently unavailable
© wikipedia.org


04:04 10/07/2012
MOSCOW, July 10 (RIA Novosti)

Tags: Wikipedia, League of Internet Security, State Duma, Russia
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The Russian-language segment of Wikipedia, the world’s largest free on-line encyclopedia, temporarily suspended its work on Tuesday in protest against a bill proposing a unified digital blacklist of all websites containing banned content.
The draft legislation, supported by all four party factions in the State Duma, has been widely criticized by civil rights activists and internet providers as an attempt to introduce censorship of the Russian segment of the internet (RuNet).
“Wikipedia community protests against censorship, which threatens free knowledge opened for the mankind,” Wikipedia says in a statement on its Russian-language website.
“We ask you to support us in the fight against this bill,” the statement says.
The site is expected to stay offline for 24 hours.
The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, passed the controversial bill in the first reading on July 6 and will debate the document in the second reading on Tuesday.
The idea of the blacklist originated last year from Russia’s League of Internet Security after the internet watchdog said it had broken up an international ring of 130 alleged pedophiles circulating material via the internet.
According to the draft document, submitted to the State Duma on June 7, the unified roster of banned websites will be run by a federal agency to be appointed by the government.
The agency will have the right to add items to the blacklist, as will the courts, which already have the authority to ban extremist and other types of content that violates Russian legislation.
The supporters of the blacklist believe it would curb the spread of on-line pornography and propaganda of extremism.
However, the opponents of the idea insist that the current version of the bill cannot be an effective tool for rooting out the illegal content and stopping its spread on the internet as it will not prevent “dirty” users from migrating to other domains and IP-addresses.
Wikipedia went offline for 24 hours in a similar action on January 18 in a protest against U.S. anti-piracy legislation that could lead to censorship. As a result of "blackout" protests on thousands of internet sites, the U.S. Congress has postponed the vote on two controversial bills until issues raised about them were resolved.

[American Patriot]

Russia’s Chinese Wall to Block the Internet


By Leonid Bershidsky Jul 11, 2012 10:31 AM MT



On July 10, the Russian-language Wikipedia greeted its millions of users with a largely blank page and a message asking them to “imagine a world without free knowledge.” The impetus for the web site's one-day protest: Russia's leaders are moving toward the creation of a "great firewall," along Chinese lines, to limit what the country's Internet users can see and read.
The next day, the lower house of Russia's parliament passed a bill that, while ostensibly aimed at protecting children from information that could be “harmful to their health and development,” allows broad censorship of the Internet. It sets up an official roster of websites containing forbidden information, including child pornography, “propaganda of drug use,” information that “may cause children to undertake actions threatening their life or health” or “any other information banned by court decisions.”
The government is supposed to contract a Russian organization, to be named later, to compile the roster of banned websites. The only way to appeal inclusion in the roster will be to go to the courts, which are notoriously loyal to the Kremlin. “Unfortunately, the practice of Russian law enforcement suggests a high probability of the worst-case scenario,” protested the blog service LiveJournal, which provides a platform for a host of opposition activists.
President Vladimir Putin's own increasingly liberal Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights denounced the bill: “Many Internet resources with legal content may suffer from mass blockage since the system introduces tough restrictions on the basis of subjective criteria and judgments.”
Protecting human rights and the free flow of information wasn't high on the agenda of the bill's authors, most of whom are from the Kremlin-loyal United Russia party. They got into parliament as a result of last December's blatantly rigged elections. The Internet, especially blog services and social networks, has provided a highly visible venue for protests against those elections and Putin's authoritarian rule in general.
The primitive system proposed by the Russian bill is not exactly comparable to what happens in China. The Golden Shield, as China's system of Internet censorship is officially known, works through a system of filters placed on servers between foreign networks and strictly licensed Chinese providers. Unlike Russia, China has tens of thousands of Internet police, and the list of “offenses” that leads to a site being blocked is much broader. It includes transgressions such as “making falsehoods or distorting the truth” and “injuring the reputation of state organizations.”
Russian anti-government activists, though, see the new bill as only a first step. “The Kremlin crooks have realized that paid commentators or robot networks will not help them in their ideological war on the Internet,” wrote anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. “Now it's going to be simple: They will leave a comment on any site, blog or forum dealing with how to make LSD from cereal, and send the site owner running around the courts for months trying to prove he did nothing wrong.”
Internet experts argue that there is no effective way to block content on the Web. Writing on the opinion website Chaskor, Andrei Kolesnikov, who heads the .ru domain's coordination committee, cited the example of a popular site called torrents.ru that was banned for spreading pirated intellectual property. The site immediately migrated to the .org domain, and, according to Kolesnikov, the added news exposure boosted its traffic by 10 percent to 20 percent. “I will take the liberty of suggesting that a black list of resources will give 'bad' resources extra popularity,” Kolesnikov wrote, adding that even the effectiveness of Chinese filters was overrated.
Migration to other domain zones or addresses is a better solution for real child pornography purveyors than for legitimate sites that may displease the government. Wikipedia's problem is that it contains pages that could fall under the proposed restrictions, such as articles on suicide or narcotic substances. As a result, the entire ru.wikipedia.org domain could be taken down. That's why Russia's lively Wikipedia community, which counts more than 800,000 members, 12,000 of whom have made changes to Wiki articles within the last 30 days, voted for the one-day strike.
“Russian Wikipedia's strike is a correct, timely and adequate reaction to this shameful circus,” one of the pioneers of Russian Internet, Anton Nosik, wrote in his blog. “For the past 12 years I have been happily confident that the Russian government will have the intelligence not to introduce censorship on the Internet... But the situation is changing.”
One of the bill's drafters, Yaroslav Nilov of the ultra-nationalist LDPR faction, claimed that Wikipedia's “leadership” had not actually read the bill, even though one of the few Russian-language Wikis that remained active during the strike provided analysis of its text. “Let's see what happens a year after the bill is passed,” Nilov said. “We'll take a look at national suicide statistics before and after. Then we'll have a full picture.”
On the other hand, it is possible that restrictive measures will prove more damaging for Russia's current leadership than for Internet users. As Kolesnikov of .ru pointed out, the Chinese firewall "can exist only within the framework of China's cultural environment and customs. Here, it would be totally unique and damaging to the nation's reputation.”
(Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is Moscow and Kiev correspondent for World View. Opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: bershidsky@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Mark Whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net.

[American Patriot]

Internet Restriction Bill Flies Through Duma

11 July 2012
By Rachel Nielsen

Minsvyaz.ru
Communications and Press Minister Nikolai Nikiforov


Legislation creating a "website blacklist" and forcing Internet companies to block banned content sailed through its second and third readings in the State Duma on Wednesday, though not before deputies amended the bill amid continued protest from web companies, free-speech supporters and a top official.
After passing in a first reading Friday with language allowing any website content to be banned once the government deems it dangerous to children, the bill now has a more limited blacklist of materials displaying child pornography, soliciting children for porn, encouraging drug use, promoting suicide and distributing content that is illegal under Russian law.
State officials will be able to enlist websites, website-hosting companies and even Internet service providers to remove or block the banned webpages. In the case of illegal content, they will need to obtain a court order before adding the pages to the blacklist, a federal registry to be created under the law.
In spite of the scaling-back of what images and text can be restricted, the third version of the legislation still doesn't make clear how much of an Internet publication — individual webpages or whole Internet domain names — will be blocked once content is blacklisted.
Communications and Press Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said Wednesday that many Russian and foreign websites exist in domains, the platforms for webpages.
"The problem is that it's possible to technologically block off all of the platforms because of one particular situation, even though that's not the purpose of the law," he told reporters after a press conference to introduce his new deputy ministers.
As a reporter from state-controlled television station Channel One lobbed questions at him about the bill, Nikiforov, appointed to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev's Cabinet in May, detailed his concerns about the law.
The bill was written by the A Just Russia-headed committee on family, women and children's issues and introduced by all four parties in the Duma.
Earlier in the week, Nikiforov had used his Twitter account to call for re-examining the bill with Internet service providers and experts during the Duma's recess in July and August and reconsidering it in the fall.
By Wednesday evening, the Duma had approved the bill in both the second and third readings, according to the Duma website. Deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, a member of A Just Russia, posted the amended, second version of the legislation on his LiveJournal blog.
The committee on family, women and children's issues recommended accepting the bill in the third reading without any changes to the second version, it said in a document on the Duma site.
Also on Wednesday, more Russian Internet services unrolled public campaigns against the law, with web portal Yandex and blogging platform LiveJournal telling users of the downsides of the law. Russian Facebook equivalent Vkontakte also publicly questioned the bill, news website RBK.ru reported.
The corporate protests came on the heels of a 24-hour blackout that the Russian version of Wikipedia had run on Tuesday.
On its homepage on Wednesday, Yandex used red lines to cross out the word "everything" from its slogan, "You can find everything." Clicking on the edited slogan led to an open letter about the bill, which is titled "On The Protection of Children From Information and Active Harm to Their Health and Development."
"The proposed methods provide a means for possible abuse and raise numerous questions from the perspective of users and Internet company representatives," Yandex said in the letter.
"It is necessary to put off the bill's consideration and discuss it in open forums with Internet company representatives and technical specialists," Yandex said in the letter, which was signed, "Yelena Kolmankovskaya, editor-in-chief, Yandex, a company where the parents of more than a thousand children work."
Now that the bill has flown through the Duma — it was introduced only late last month — it will go to the Federation Council and, if approved by the upper house, then to President Vladimir Putin for his signature.
Though Nikiforov has opposed the bill in its current form because of its nebulous wording, he doesn't have much say about the law as the head of a bureaucratic swath of government, Pavel Salin, a political analyst with the Center for Current Politics, said by telephone.
The Duma will listen to Putin "more than to a minister," Salin said.



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