[x-pubpol] Bill to Restrict Web Content Is Assailed in Russia

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/world/europe/wikipedia-shuts-site-to-protest-bill-for-firewall-in-russia.html

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

MOSCOW — Major Internet sites and human rights advocates sharply
criticized a proposed law that would grant the Russian government
broad new powers to restrict Web content, ostensibly to protect
children from pornography and other harmful material. Critics said the
law could quickly lead to repression of speech and a restrictive
firewall like the one in China.

The new measure is part of a wider effort by the Russian authorities
to crack down on the opposition since President Vladimir V. Putin’s
inauguration in May. They have adopted a law sharply increasing
financial penalties on protesters who take part in unsanctioned
rallies, begun criminal investigations into several political
opposition leaders and considered a plan to require nongovernmental
organizations receiving foreign aid to register as foreign agents and
face additional auditing and reporting requirements.

With television networks in Russia — and most newspapers and other
media outlets — under tight government control, the Internet has
emerged as the primary medium for political discourse. Citizens using
cellphone cameras documented fraud in last December’s parliamentary
elections, then posted video to YouTube and other sites. Organizers of
the huge anti-government protests that followed turned to Facebook and
other social media to draw tens of thousands of demonstrators on to
the streets of Moscow.

The bill has been moving quickly through the Duma, the lower house of
Parliament. An initial version was approved last week and a second
version, including some amendments, is scheduled for debate in the
chamber on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Wikipedia was joined in opposing the legislation by
Yandex, the Russian search engine, and Live Journal, the country’s
most popular blog-hosting site, which provides a platform for a number
of Russia’s most outspoken political commentators and opponents of Mr.
Putin’s government.

VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site, stripped a
message across the top of its home page saying, “the State Duma is
considering a law to impose censorship on the Internet.” It directed
visitors to Wikipedia’s Russian site, where the only information
available on Tuesday was criticism of the legislation. While
supporters of the law said it would create new protections for
children against illicit content, critics said the Internet was so
porous that such content could never be fully stopped while sites like
Wikipedia, which has encyclopedia entries on all sorts of adult
topics, would be vulnerable to government repression.

“The legislation in its current form will be ineffective,” said Ochir
Mandzhikov, a spokesman for Yandex. “At a minimum it is necessary to
work further on a conceptual framework and clearly write out the
procedures,” he added, “in order to preclude possible abuses.”

Earlier this year, the English-language Wikipedia, American Web sites
and technology companies participated in a similar protest effort
against two bills in the United States Congress that were aimed at
cracking down on piracy. The effort helped derail the legislation.

The proposed law in Russia would establish a registry or so-called
“black list” of Internet content that is prohibited for publication,
and it would create procedures for blocking Web hosting companies that
do not block the banned material.

Law enforcement agents would be empowered to add sites to the registry
of banned material, in some cases without obtaining a court order. The
bill would allow sites to be blocked using domain names and IP
addresses. It would effectively require access to banned material to
be cut off within 72 hours, though some details of how the government
would enforce the restrictions were not laid out in the bill.

Natalya Kaspersky, chief executive of InfoWatch, a software company
that provides data protection services, said some new restrictions
were needed in Russia to protect children and that the fears of
government censorship seemed overblown.

“We might argue if such ‘black list’ approach is efficient in the
modern Internet assuming the sites might quickly move to another
address,” Ms. Kaspersky wrote in an e-mail. “However, it is better
than nothing.”

She added, “Right now we have a tremendous freedom of speech in mass
media, with no prohibited topics at all.”

The Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights, an
advisory body, issued a statement sharply criticizing the legislation,
saying “the list of resources to be blocked is too broad.”

The group said the law would allow “restricting access to information
which is prohibited or undesirable for children, for all users of the
Russian segment of the Internet, with no possible appeal procedures
and re-examination.” The group added, “Many bona fide Internet
resources with legal content may be affected by the mass block since
the system would impose severe restrictions on the basis of subjective
criteria and assessments.”

“The Internet is the only thing that stands between Russia and the
Spiral of Silence,” said Ivan Zassoursky, the chairman of the New
Media Department in the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State
University, referring to a theory put forward by the German political
scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, in which people, feeling isolated,
silence their own political views.

“The Internet has been a very strong force to counter that,” Mr.
Zassoursky said. “It has given life to political discourse in a very
free and independent way.”

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