You will pee with us again

The Kremlin begins to restrict Runet. The first target is blogs of journalists

After Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the leadership of the popular Internet resource Odnoklassniki.ru received a call from the Kremlin, says a source close to the company's management. The official who called asked why even Nicaragua was included in the list of countries available on the site, but not Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The next day, attentive users found that the list of states had expanded by two points.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is an active Internet user and propagandist. But the Kremlin understands that in recent years the Internet has been creating its own information agenda, very different from the one offered by television and newspapers. Runet has never, unlike the media, faced any restrictions. But now the time has come - RuNet is becoming the focus of protest.

A month ago, a series of protests took place across Russia, called the "day of wrath." It is thanks to the Internet that local protests against the growth of utility tariffs have become a national event. On the eve of the "day of wrath" Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov unexpectedly admitted that he felt "the color and taste of the flower revolution."

The Kremlin is seriously concerned with the problem of regulating the Internet, although it understands that the Chinese model - with blocking disloyal sites and filtering out any negative information about the party and the government - cannot be applied in Russia. Once the tube has been squeezed out, the paste cannot be returned to its place, say the old-timers of the Internet. In addition, why kill a resource that supporters of the authorities often use much more successfully than their opponents.

Therefore, the Internet is not crushed, but they are trying to tame. According to Newsweek, the Kremlin is drafting a bill equating blogs with mass media. True, not all, but only those belonging to the most politically active bloggers - journalists. At the same time, the government is designing a national search engine and operating system. And the secret services come up with new ways to eliminate anonymity on the Internet, requiring providers to give out the data of their subscribers.

KAZAKH EXPERIENCE

Ideas to equate personal pages on the Internet with the media have been heard for more than 11 years, says Anton Nosik, one of the founders of Runet. At one of the government meetings in 1999, Communications Minister Leonid Reiman and Press Minister Mikhail Lesin suggested that Vladimir Putin simultaneously extend the press law to the Internet and transfer domain zones to the jurisdiction of the state. But the prime minister, according to eyewitnesses, refused, declaring the Internet a "zone of administrative freedom." Since then, calls to equalize blogs and the media have come from Senators Vladimir Slutsker and Lyudmila Narusova, Deputy Prosecutor General Ivan Sydoruk, and even Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov.

This idea is being discussed even now, states Deputy Robert Schlegel, who, however, considers it unnecessary. At the same time, Schlegel complains that Russian legislators pay insufficient attention to regulating the Internet. According to him, there is a working group in the Duma headed by Olga Noskova, which should deal with the law on the Internet, but it has not met for a year. So long as there are no new Internet laws, opponents of network regulation have achieved an important victory. Last week, the Plenum of the Supreme Court issued an explanation to the law on the press, which states that Internet sites cannot be equated with mass media.

A law that equates any personal page on the Internet to mass media already exists in Kazakhstan. Both journalists and bloggers are punished to the fullest extent for criticizing the authorities. This law has a history. Two years ago, the son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Rakhat Aliyev, who fell into disfavor, started a diary in LiveJournal and a personal page on the Mail.ru portal. The former relative of the president used the new site exclusively for publishing compromising information on Nazarbayev. Aliyev's revelations blew up the Kazakh Internet.

Nazarbayev did not want to act rudely. Therefore, at first, the deputy prosecutor general of the republic, Johann Merkel, sent an official letter to Annelis van den Belt, the head of the Sup company, which owns the Russian-language segment of LiveJournal. The letter said that the Kazakh authorities were very unwilling to kick LiveJournal out of the republic. Wouldn't the company be so kind, the official wrote, to close just one page - the diary of Rakhat Aliyev, who is accused of attempting a coup d'état. With Mail.ru, this issue was settled amicably - Aliyev's blog was liquidated. But "Sup" ignored the letter of the Kazakhs, redirecting them to the American court. Then LiveJournal in Kazakhstan was simply cut off. “LiveJournal in Kazakhstan was closed by Kazakhtelecom. We have not received any official explanation as to why this happened," Annelis van den Belt told Newsweek. By the way, Kyrgyzstan also suffered for the company - Kazakhtelecom also cut it off from LiveJournal.

SOCIAL THREAT

Of course, there is no compromising evidence similar to the Kazakh one, but about the Russian authorities, on the Internet. However, protest campaigns taking place online are of great concern to officials. “Now the hype around flashing lights in the Kremlin is more afraid than terrorist attacks. Everyone understands that the middle class, using the Internet platform, completely got rid of it, ”explains a source close to the presidential administration.

The state takes bloggers who have got loose so seriously that it comes to curiosities. A few months ago, the head of the presidential administration, Sergei Naryshkin, held a special meeting on the threat posed by the blog of the secular chronicler Gazeta.ru, Bozena Rynska. The journalist regularly scolded the prime minister in her diary, whose motorcade detained her on her way to work. One of her obscene posts was publicly praised by TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak.

They say that following the meeting in the Kremlin, Sergei Naryshkin personally called Senator Lyudmila Narusova with a request to "carry out educational work with her daughter and her friend." A few days later, Ksenia Sobchak on the air of Silver Rain talked about the fact that you should not call the head of government a "nit". A source close to the Sup company also says that shareholders and management had a lot of problems because of the socialite chronicler's blog.

The idea was born of itself: let the restrictions that apply to the media affect, if not all blogs, then at least those that are run by journalists.

BRITISH MODEL

Two weeks ago, the Kremlin received support from abroad. The British Press Complaints Commission for the first time extended media law to blog columnist Rod Liddle. In his blog on the website of the Spectator magazine, the journalist reported that black people from the Caribbean were to blame for most London crimes. The commission demanded from the journalist a refutation of the facts, which she recognized as untrue. From now on, the Kremlin likes to say that it is necessary to "take advantage of the British model."

It is not necessary to follow the path of Kazakhstan and try to control all bloggers at once, the Kremlin official explains: “Many of them can’t do anything except write the word “sucks.” The idea, a Newsweek source explains, is to require any reporter who blogs - on an editorial site or on LiveJournal - to register it as a media outlet. The journalist is not like other Internet users, the official argues. He has access to information from the authorities, which means that he must be responsible for the use of his exclusive knowledge. And to answer according to the law on the media - to publish a refutation of information published in blogs, to pay fines for factual errors and damage to the business reputation of the newsmaker.

In extreme cases, a blogger may lose the right to publish on the Internet on his own behalf. In the same way as the media, in case of violation of the law, they can be deprived of registration. The logic of turning blogs into media is not even in punishment, but in intimidation, the source of Newsweek admits: a precedent is enough when a blogger is awarded a large fine, and many will quiet down.

Supporters of this idea remind that journalists themselves insist on a special status. For example, the Union of Journalists of Moscow concluded an agreement with the leadership of the capital's police department to work at rallies. According to the agreement, the police should not detain journalists who are covering an unsanctioned protest if, for example, they are wearing vests with distinctive signs.

“Blogs are the user's personal space,” argues Soup's top manager Anneliese van den Belt. “From our point of view, they are not mass media, as this contradicts the very ideology of blogging.” Maxim Emm from Informzaschita explains that if resources like LiveJournal are required to register some users as mass media, it will not be technically difficult to do so. “You just need to refine the site by adding the programming code of the blogs,” he says. In this case, when registering on the site, the journalist will receive an individual identifier.

This is not the first time the Internet has encountered special marks. Two years ago, speaking at the opening of the Russian Internet forum, Medvedev complained that he had found 645 fake pages with his own portrait on the Odnoklassniki portal. The press secretary of the resource, Nana Kulikova, according to eyewitnesses, resourcefully advised the president to write 645 complaints that would allow the resource to rid him of unwanted doubles.

But everything turned out the other way around. The President of course did not write complaints. But Odnoklassniki introduced an identification mark for VIP users - a yellow star, which was approved by the management of the resource and guaranteed the authenticity of the personal page. The star was immediately criticized - they say, what should Jews do when they discover that their pages in Odnoklassniki are marked with a yellow star. As a result, the star changed color to orange.

NATIONAL SEARCH ENGINE

Since the beginning of spring, the Internet community has been discussing another idea of ​​officials - the creation of a national search engine, which the Ministry of Communications is supposedly going to launch. According to the market, it is planned to spend about $100 million on the project. According to several Newsweek sources in IT companies, Ashmanov and Partners, headed by one of Rambler's former top managers Igor Ashmanov, want to entrust the creation of the resource. Among his latest projects are the Antispam systems for Kaspersky Lab and work on government orders - the Healthy Russia website. Evil tongues claim that the site turned out to be disproportionately expensive - several times more expensive than it is planned to spend on the Duma's new site with support for videoconferencing.

The idea of ​​creating a national search engine caused misunderstanding in the market. “Why does Russia need a new resource if the market is tightly divided between the leaders - Yandex and Google?” - Maxim Emm is perplexed. “If you follow the free choice of Russians, then they vote for Yandex,” says blogger and Internet manager Anton Nosik.

This is a slap in the face to the current search engines, experts are sure. And a reason for political bargaining. When a new player appears, plucking the audience from the leaders, they can become more accommodating in matters of information policy - a fundamental issue of state propaganda. “It is no longer very clear what influences the information picture of the day more - news in the media or Yandex.News feeds,” the Kremlin official says.

It is difficult to talk about any independence of Russian search engines. For example, at the end of last year, Yandex had to stop publishing the rating of popular blogs. According to sources close to the company's management, "Yandex is tired of the fact that after the appearance of each top news in blogs, a call was heard from the Kremlin."

Another interlocutor, close to the company's management, claims that Yandex has more than once been the victim of professional spammers, who brought "provocative news" to the top. Two years ago there was a real scandal - in the Yandex search for the query "enemy of the people" the name "Putin" and a link to the Kremlin's website came up. Professionals explain that this is a search engine optimization method - a special program can send a search engine on the wrong track. The company had to quickly correct the situation. True, the editorial touched only on the query leading to the result "Putin". Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko remained in Yandex for a long time the first answer to the request of the “hellish soton”.

Users have repeatedly spoiled the already not cloudless relationship between the largest search engine and the leaders of the state. Two years ago, during an online conference at the Yandex site, Vladimir Putin had to answer questions about "Cthulhu" and "humanoid robots" - users voted for these questions. Putin answered questions, but did not hold any more conferences at Yandex. Vesti.ru became the new and only online platform.

The then First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also stepped on the same rake with Yandex. On the eve of the presidential elections, he also decided to hold an online conference at Yandex in the status of curator of national projects. The president's advisers made sure - users were strictly limited to the topics of four national projects, and the questions were divided into thematic blocks. Flash mobs found a bizarre way out: in the first place in the “agriculture” section, they brought the question about vegetables from the popular joke about Putin and Medvedev.

A source in one of the companies investing in the Internet believes that the “national search engine” is just empty talk that will not end in anything, but the goal of this campaign is not Yandex, but Google. The fact is that the Russian search engine still seeks to demonstrate its loyalty to the state - last year it was announced the sale of the “golden share” of Yandex to Sberbank. Google, on the other hand, is surrounded by scandals.

At the end of April, the company, which noisily left the Chinese market, announced that it would make public all inquiries it received from government officials from around the world. So the company is going to fight political censorship - requests to install special information filters or give out information about users. For starters, the company published a rating of requests for the last six months of last year. Brazil tops the list of applicants, with Russia at the bottom. Nevertheless, representatives of the state applied to the company at least ten times in six months.

There should be fewer difficulties with the national search engine, say the patriots of the Internet: it will filter out unreliable sites on its own. Together with him, a national operating system should be created: “We are the only country that runs entirely on the Microsoft Windows-Office system,” says a Kremlin official. “Government agencies need more privacy.”

In the Internet environment, however, it is considered almost a fantasy. “With the same success, you can make Russian national sim cards that do not fit into imported phones,” Anton Nosik ironically.

While the Kremlin and the White House are thinking about how to regulate the Internet without much image loss, the secret services are bluntly demanding that providers disclose information about users. Two weeks ago, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications prepared a draft order obliging Internet providers to provide law enforcement agencies with information about the IP addresses of subscribers.

However, since 2000, providers have been subject to the order of the Ministry of Communications, which obliged them to install the SORM-2 system. It allows intelligence agencies to obtain information about connections and traffic of subscribers. The only problem is that there will not be enough frames to process all the received data. Even despite this, the system has actually already helped the state to cope with the main problem of the Internet - anonymity. But in the future, Internet regulators dream, even this will not be necessary. The Internet is becoming a more civilized environment, which means that anonymity is becoming a thing of the past, MP Schlegel reflects. At the same time, he hopes that in the future all users will have personal Internet IDs. With their help, it will be possible to calculate the author of any LiveJournal post, the creator of any website or the distributor of any video.

WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

For the first time, a guilty verdict was handed down to a blogger in Russia in the summer of 2008 - a musician from Syktyvkar Savva Terentyev, who spoke unflatteringly about policemen. In less than two years, scandals related to the blogosphere have become commonplace.

August 2009

On the third day after the flooding of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, Mikhail Afanasiev, aka rukhakasia, editor of the local Internet publication Novy Focus, who covered the events, wrote in his personal blog, citing relatives of the victims, that there were living people at the accident site, but the only way to save them is to completely open the gates at the neighboring Mainskaya HPP. Then the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Shoigu, angrily commented on the information: “People are in grief, and unverified information is being thrown at them.” A case was opened against Afanasiev, but was soon closed due to the lack of corpus delicti.

October 2009

Moscow student Liza Oleskina, who organized a volunteer community to help lonely old people, posted on her blog o-liska a story with photos about the terrible attitude towards the wards in a nursing home in the village of Yamm, Pskov region. The story quickly spread throughout the blogosphere, other users posted links to it on President Medvedev's blog, and the scandal was picked up by the media. Two days later, the director of the orphanage was fired, the nursing home was soon moved out, and President Medvedev praised the local authorities for promptly responding to signals from the blogosphere.

October 2009

In Samara, 29-year-old unemployed blogger Dmitry Kirilin aka new_m0ray was sentenced to a year of probation for public calls to extremism. As the regional FSB explained in a press release, “during the investigation, it was established that since 2000, as a result of reflections on problems related to the organization of power, Kirilin came to the conclusion that the current system of state government leads to degradation, moral decay and extinction of the Russian people” . The man decided to call on the Internet like-minded people to overthrow the "world government", which allegedly imposed the existing political regime on Russia.

November 2009

Former press secretary of the president of Tatarstan, Irek Murtazin, was sentenced to 1 year and 9 months in a colony-settlement for slandering the head of the republic and inciting ethnic hatred. The investigation into the case began after Murtazin posted unconfirmed information about the death of Mintimer Shaimiev on his blog. Added to this were accusations of propagating ideas that degrade human dignity and undermine trust in the authorities, which were found by investigators in Murtazin's publications both on the Internet and in the press.

November 2009

Major Alexey Dymovsky of the Novorossiysk Internal Affairs Directorate woke up famous after his website www.dymovskiy.ru two video messages appeared on : one - to all officers with a request to support him, the second - to Prime Minister Putin about his small salary, denial of treatment and violations in the work of his ATC. After that, Dymovsky was fired for libel, he went on a tour of Russia, he gained followers, and when he returned, he faced criminal prosecution for fraud in 2005-2007 and two lawsuits from his former bosses for libel and ended up in a pre-trial detention center. The court satisfied the claims, obliging Dymovsky to pay 50,000 rubles to each, and the case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations. Major continues to post video messages.

December 2009

Kemerovo graduate student Dmitry Solovyov aka dimon77 was acquitted of charges of inciting hatred for lack of corpus delicti. He faced up to two years in prison for writing on his blog under the headings “People in Gray Can’t Break Defense,” “FSB Kills Russian Children,” “Communists and Bloody KGB at the Same Time and Now.” It was assumed that the tapes were directed against law enforcement agencies, but two examinations did not find negative images of any social groups in them. Solovyov was returned a laptop, a system unit and two mobile phones confiscated during the investigation.

February 2010

Famous animal trainer Yuri Kuklachev won a lawsuit against mathematician and publicist Mikhail Verbitsky aka tiphareth. The latter, in his blog on lj.rossia.org, called Kuklachev a flayer and social evil, and also wrote that the trainer tortures cats with electric shocks. Kuklachev filed a lawsuit, complaining that "people understand freedom of speech as 'freedom of insult'." Verbitsky appealed to bloggers, arguing that it was about censorship on the Internet. Opinions in the blogosphere were divided, and in February the court sided with Kuklachev and ordered Verbitsky to remove some phrases and pay the trainer 40,000 rubles in compensation.

February 2010

Russian Internet users disrupted the competition of the German airline Lufthansa for an unofficial name for the Airbus A380 family of aircraft. In an Internet vote, Russian Marina Karyakina proposed the option "Stalingrad", and to the shock of the Germans, he came out on top with the support of more than 6,000 votes. The airline refused to name the plane that way, citing the fact that they would like a cute name that children might like.

February 2010

The case of the Ulyanovsk author of the site Ichkeria.info, 46-year-old Sergey Kryukov, who published articles “Rusism is a holiday of evil”, “Russian field: the seeds of lies gave rise to the weed of Satanism” and so on, in which the investigators found a pronounced negative attitude towards the Russian people, was submitted to the court, Russian state and Russian Orthodoxy and saw signs of inciting hostility. As part of the investigation, in June 2009, Kryukov was placed in a psychiatric hospital. He himself does not deny the authorship of the articles, but admits his guilt in part. He faces up to eight years in prison.

February 2010

The trial of the case against the former policeman Roman Zhirov, who knocked down a pregnant Muscovite to death and fled the scene of an accident, began. It was possible to establish the identity of the violator only after the husband of the deceased, Aleksey Shumm, published a call for help in his LiveJournal, to which more than 800 bloggers responded, brought this entry to the top and thus found witnesses and forced the police to conduct a thorough investigation.

March 2010

Moscow motorist Stanislav Sutyagin, who became an unwitting participant in the traffic police operation, expressed his outrage in a video posted on YouTube. His car was damaged when the criminals tried to break through the "human shield" of the capital's motorists, which was built by traffic inspectors. Soon Sutyagin became not only a hero of YouTube, but also of the media, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to extinguish the scandal: the inspectors were removed from work, the head of the UGIBDD was severely reprimanded, a criminal case was initiated on abuse of authority, all participants in the "human shield" were awarded letters of commendation, Sutyagin was presented with a watch and All victims of the traffic police repaired the car.

March 2010

Russian actor and director Nikita Mikhalkov was offended by bloggers at the suggestion of Artemy Lebedev aka Tema, who, for one of the traditional Friday offers for photoshops, chose a poster for the new film Burnt by the Sun 2: Anticipation, which had not yet been released, which depicted Mikhalkov himself in the image of his hero. Enthusiasts have created more than 200 photoshops. The director's daughter, Nadya Mikhalkova, suggested that her father "will deal with these 'wits' in court," to which Lebedev replied in his blog that "someone confused Soviet newspapers with an independent blog." However, Mikhalkov himself said that he would not go to court.

April 2010

The Kostroma prosecutor's office sent to the court materials on the case against a member of the Kostroma Jedi Forum, who writes under the nickname Prishelec. The fact is that as an avatar he uses a photograph of a window with bars, which, as they say on the website of the prosecutor's office, "is confusingly similar to Nazi symbols." Investigators are confident that the "Jedi" was aware of this resemblance and that his avatar would be available to an unlimited number of people.

April 2010

The prosecutor's office of the Kirov region has launched an investigation into publications in the blog of the Deputy Prime Minister of the regional government, in the past - the well-known oppositionist Maria Gaidar. She, speaking in the blogosphere under the nickname m-gaidar, spoke about her subordinates, providing the text with photographs. The prosecutor's office is now investigating whether the actions of Gaidar, as a state official, violated the law on the protection of personal data.

April 2010

Moscow bloggers held an action of "Blue Buckets" against flashing lights on the cars of Russian officials. About 50 cars with children's buckets on the roof were able to drive from Triumfalnaya Square along Sadovoye Koltso, Novy Arbat, Mokhovaya, Lubyanka, Kremlin Embankment, Yakimanka, Leninsky Prospekt, ending their run on the observation deck near Moscow State University, despite "poorly coordinated, but stubborn and intrusive the actions of traffic police officers, ”Norwegian Lesnoy reported in his LiveJournal.

April 2010

Nikolai Kazanin, a resident of Severodvinsk, has been convicted in the Arkhangelsk Region. On the VKontakte social network, he posted photos with fascist paraphernalia and videos showing young people beating people from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Under the article on inciting hatred, the young man was sentenced to 180 hours of compulsory work.

April 2010

Blogger Vladimir Andreichenko achieved recognition in court of the fact of illegal initiation of a criminal case against him and, as a result, its termination. A year ago, the governor of the Kostroma region, Igor Slyunyaev, filed a complaint with the police, considering the article by his former deputy Andreichenko “Where will Slyunyaev and bibs lead the Kostroma region” to be slanderous and insulting, published on one of the Internet portals under the pseudonym Kostroma Rossiyanovna Deceived.