VII. Internet Content Restrictions

The Legislative Amendments of July 2012

On July 11 the Russian State Duma adopted a bill introducing new restrictions on Internet content. Known as law No. 139-FZ, the new law calls for the creation of a unified register of prohibited websites containing information, “the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation,” which will then be blocked by Internet service providers (ISPs). The bill came into effect on November 1, 2012.

The law authorizes a federal executive body (hereinafter, the “designated agency”) to maintain the register of blacklisted websites, and Roskomnadzor, the Russian Federal Surveillance Service for Mass Media and Communications, has administered the register since its launch.[198]

With the stated goal of protecting children, the law instructs the designated agency to maintain in the register websites hosting child pornography images, drug-related material, and information that “incites the commission of suicide” or contains “suicide instructions” in the register.

Several government agencies can submit websites for the registry without a court order, including the Interior Ministry, the Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), and the Federal Service on Surveillance for Consumer Rights Protection and Human Well-Being (Rospotrebnadzor). Roskomnadzor also updates the registry based on court decisions identifying websites containing other, unspecified categories of “illegal content.”[199]  In addition, any individual can submit a complaint about online content to Roskomnadzor through its website, which will then be reviewed by Roskomnadzor or the appropriate government agency for inclusion.[200]

Once Roskomnadzor adds a website to the Registry, content-hosting providers have 24 hours to notify the website owner to remove the prohibited content. The website owner is given another 24 hours to comply. Once the content has been removed, Roskomnadzor removes the website from the Registry.[201] If the website owner fails to take down the content, the website remains on the Registry and ISPs must restrict access to the website within 24 hours.[202] Roskomnadzor will only remove a website from the Registry if the owner either takes down the harmful material and sends the agency a request for reinstatement or successfully appeals its ban in court.[203] Appeals must be filed within three months from the day the website was added to the registry.[204]

Potential Impact on Freedom of Expression, Access to Information, and the Right to Privacy

Civil society and industry groups have criticized the definitions of prohibited material as vaguely and broadly defined, leaving too much discretion to government agencies.[205] Opponents also fear that once the mechanisms for nationwide Internet filtering are in place, the kinds of content subject to Roskomnadzor’s decisions will expand over time. In addition, depending on the method of website blocking that ISPs employ – by domain name, uniform resource locator (URL), or Internet protocol (IP) address – the law could lead to disproportionate over-blocking of legal content, with entire services blocked to prevent access to a single video or piece of content.[206]

The Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights also criticized the law, warning that the blacklist would become an “electronic curtain” that would obstruct the development of Russian society.[207] The council argued that the law would limit access to information without sufficient due process guarantees, and that blocking does not address the underlying causes of harm to children. The lack of transparency also prevents scrutiny required to prevent the registry’s misuse as a censorship tool. While the public may check whether a specific website is blocked on the Roskomnadzor website, Roskomnadzor does not publish a full list of blocked websites.[208]

On July 10, 2012, the day before the Duma considered the draft law in second reading, Wikipedia’s Russian website declared a 24-hour blackout and boycott in protest against the bill, which they said would lead to Internet censorship in Russia. The website placed a black banner over the word Wikipedia, which read, “Imagine a world without free knowledge.” [209] Search engines Google and Yandex and social networking sites LiveJournal and VKontakte also joined the protest, urging the authorities to postpone the speedy adoption of the bill pending its further discussion. [210]

In addition, as proponents of the law have suggested, the new law will likely promote nationwide adoption by ISPs of an intrusive monitoring method known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).[211] Eric King, head researcher at London-based watchdog Privacy International, describes DPI’s broader deployment: “No Western democracy has yet implemented a dragnet black-box DPI surveillance system due to the crushing effect it would have on free speech and privacy. DPI allows the state to peer into everyone’s internet traffic and read, copy or even modify e-mails and webpages….”[212]

While ISPs may use DPI for commercial reasons, nationwide adoption, made more likely by the new law, raises concerns for the right to privacy in Russia.[213] In 2008 the government began requiring ISPs to install equipment that gives the Federal Security Service (FSB) direct, 24-hour, remote access to their networks to monitor Internet traffic under the SORM “lawful interception” program.[214] While such surveillance may, in theory, be subject to a court order, there is no technical mechanism to prevent unauthorized access, undermining safeguards against illegal surveillance.[215] If SORM obligations are combined with broad adoption of DPI, surveillance may become cheaper and more efficient, allowing agencies to monitor more individuals with fewer resources by shifting the burden to ISPs.

Without stronger oversight and more robust safeguards against illegal surveillance, Law No. 139-FZ could heighten risks that these technologies may be abused, leading to privacy or other harms. As an engineer from one DPI vendor in Russia expresses it, “if you know that [Alexei] Navalny, one of the most famous opposition leaders, is a customer of a known [ISP], you may get all Navalny traffic to be copied through the DPI to the external system. It’s real. And it even shows you which sites he has been to.”[216]

Implementation

According to Roskomnadzor, as of March 15, 2013, the agency received 33,288 requests to place web content in the registry, and the registry contained 4,275 items.[217]

In the first month of the registry’s launch, several popular Russian websites were blocked. On November 11, 2012, Roskomnadzor placed Lurkmore.to, a Russian-language encyclopedia and humor site, in the register at the request of the Federal Drug Control Service.[218] The site became accessible again two days later after its administrators deleted two articles related to marijuana.[219]

Roskomnadzor similarly banned RuTracker, a file-sharing website, for a period of hours until it deleted a copy of The Suicide Handbook from its database.[220] In a third case, access to online library Librusek was blocked because it contained a copy of The Anarchist Handbook. The Federal Drug Control Service purportedly took issue with a marijuana-related chapter of the book, but the site was reinstated only after the entire file was removed.[221]

On January 11, 2013, Roskomnadzor blocked the LiveJournal blog of Rustem Adagamov for publishing “suicide propaganda.” Adagamov, who blogs on LiveJournal under the alias of “drugoi” (“the different one”), is one of the most widely followed bloggers in Russia.  The blog entry in question, posted in November, included photos of Tibetan independence activists performing self-immolation. As of January 22, 2013, Adagamov’s blog was again active after he deleted the entry.[222]

In a similar case, Roskomnadzor censored an entry posted by well-known Russian blogger and web designer Artemy Lebedev on February 1, 2013. Three days before, Lebedev had posted a link to the YouTube video “Dumb Ways to Die” on his popular LiveJournal blog. The video, which gathered over 40 million views, was part of a rail safety campaign created by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia. It depicts cartoon characters killing themselves in a number of absurd ways, such as swimming with piranhas or eating old pie, and includes a song describing their deaths. After his entry was added to the unified register along with the Russian version of the YouTube video, Lebedev shared part of the letter he received from Roskomnadzor on his blog. According to the website monitoring agency,

The lyrics of the song contain a description of various methods of suicide, such as: taking expired medicine, standing on the edge of a train platform, running across the tracks between platforms, and eating a tube of superglue. The animated characters illustrate the described methods of suicide in a humorous way which attracts children and teenagers. Lines such as ‘hide in a dryer’ and ‘I wonder what this button does’ incite people to commit these acts.[223]

On February 18, 2013, Lebedev reported on his blog that access to the entry was reinstalled at the request of Roskomnadzor.[224]

In March 2013 Facebook stated that it had removed content relating to suicide that had been placed on the unified registry, and Twitter stated that it had removed posts that were on the federal registry on the basis that they had drug- and suicide-related content.[225]