Is the closure of Pravda.Ru a “touchstone”?

On March 23, 2006, access to materials from the Pravda.Ru website was suspended. According to the general director of Pravda.Ru Inna Novikova, the Internet resource provider, the Masterhost company, sent to the editor excerpts from the FSB letter addressed to the provider, which contains a demand to remove cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from the sites caricatura.ru and pravda.ru as inciting religious hatred .

The publisher of Pravda.Ru decided to block access to the Internet resource. The publication insists it did not reprint the Danish cartoons of Muhammad or link to them in its editorials. “We responsibly declare that there were and are no such materials on the pages of Pravda.Ru,” says an official statement posted on the newspaper’s website. However, I. Novikova admitted that the materials could have been posted on the publication’s forum .

The Masterhost company confirmed the receipt of a letter signed by the deputy head of the division of the operational control center of the FSB information security center S.Yu. Mikhailov. The letter contains a request to “take measures to remove” Danish cartoons from the websites caricatura.ru and pravda.ru, posted there by “unidentified persons.”

Press secretary of the Masterhost company Ruslan Kurepin (who is the owner of the website caricatura.ru) suggested that “someone from the FSB decided to take the simplest route: they read the list of our clients and, in order not to contact each one separately, sent a request to us.” . R. Kurepin also claims that caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were never published on the website caricatura.ru.

On March 23, 2006, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation denied the information that the publication was closed at its request, and regarded the situation “as clumsy self-PR” of Pravda.Ru.

On the same day, the editors of Pravda.Ru posted a statement on the website, saying that the site would not be opened until the FSB explained its behavior and apologized to the editors. However, the next day, March 24, 2006, access to the site's main page was restored and an editorial appeared on it.

In this article, the editors of the online publication call the incident a “touchstone for the curtailment of freedom of speech on the Internet” and come to the conclusion that the FSB is pushing providers to introduce censorship on the websites they host.

Glasnost Defense Foundation lawyer Svetlana Zemskova commented on the incident as follows: “It remains unclear why the FSB officer turned specifically to the provider with a demand to remove the cartoons allegedly posted on the media website. It would be more logical in this situation to carry out operational measures in relation to the media itself, if they are violators of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation... In this situation, such requirements look like censorship, which directly contradicts both the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the law on the media."

“If someone interferes with the operation of a website through a provider, this actually means closing the media on behalf of the state. But this clearly cannot be recognized as legal,” in particular, the lawyer noted.

Kozenko A. FSB connected to the Internet // Kommersant. 2006. March 24.

Sources

• The FSB of the Russian Federation has suspended access to materials from Pravda.Ru // Lenta.Ru. 2006. March 23.
• "Pravda.Ru" refuses to work until the FSB formally apologizes // Lenta.Ru. 2006. March 23.
• FSB denies involvement in the closure of the online publication // Strana.Ru. 2006. March 23.
• FSB appoints providers as censors? // Pravda.Ru. March 24.
• Expert: The intervention of special services in the work of the Pravda.Ru website “definitely cannot be considered legal” // REGNUM news agency. 2006. March 24.