Why did Zuckerberg actually come to Russia?

And the answer to this question lies on the surface, but first things first. Against the backdrop of the Russian authorities tightening the screws on all fronts, and in particular on the Internet, with the introduction of censorship and access control, Mark’s arrival seemed to all news and media publications to be a joyride into wild territory. Although this is not surprising: there is NO media freedom in Russia!

The media have long been biased publications and they write exclusively on orders and only what is required. The only free-thinking in the Russian Federation can be boasted only by blogging and indie media platforms, as well as forums and social networks. Although they also have problems with the free presentation of information, this is all because they walk on thin ice and answer with their own heads - for the users who publish there, or rather with their certificate of registration as a media outlet.

So, the creator of Facebook is in Moscow for the first time, and he also came to expand his business - how can you write something bad here?! But, as reality shows, these are all emotions; in fact, the social network Facebook will soon, in the very near future, turn into its clone “Vkontakte”. You ask - what's the catch? The fact that the domestic analogue is a intelligence service base for every citizen of the country, where control and surveillance systems were built in initially during its design and have proven themselves very well - this is the opinion of FSB employees, in any case they are satisfied.

But things weren’t so great with the American giant. And as time has shown, to be more precise, the last year during which protest sentiments have grown significantly and the activity of the “enemy” network has increased, the government went on a counter-offensive and decided to seize the initiative, just in case something didn’t work out. Having watched enough Western TV channels and read their press, we quickly realized that we should set everyone and everything to Ctrl.

In the summer, on June 29, the UN Human Rights Council at its regular session adopted a resolution regarding the rights of Internet users: “Promotion, protection and implementation of human rights on the Internet.” Which says in particular:

1. Reaffirms that the same rights that a person has in the offline environment must also be protected in the online environment, in particular the right to freedom of expression, which is regardless of borders and for any media a person chooses, in accordance with Articles 19 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;

2. Recognizes the global and open nature of the Internet, which is one of the driving forces behind accelerating progress towards development in its various forms;

3. Calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the Internet and international cooperation for the development of media and information and communication facilities in all countries;

4. Invites the special procedures to take these issues into account within the framework of their mandates accordingly;

5. Decides to continue to consider the promotion, protection and fulfillment of human rights, including the right to freedom of expression, on the Internet and other technological environments, and how the Internet could serve as an important tool for the development and implementation of human rights, in accordance with its program of work.

Russia was the only one out of 73 countries that refused to sign the document. The next swallow, on July 6, was Ms. Mizulina from the “opposition” “Fair” Russia, who initiated a law with supposedly good intentions to protect children from pornography and create a “black list” of malicious sites, which became a precedent for the introduction of draconian measures to monitor the network and a response to the Human Rights Council, as Russia understands freedom of speech in general and on the Internet in particular. And while everyone was moving in, what was happening, before they knew it, in the fall, users received total control and censorship of the Internet. At the insistence of these departments: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the State Drug Control Service, Rospotrebnadzor and Roskomnadzor, that is, WITHOUT A COURT DECISION, any Internet resource can be included in the “black list” and access to it will be closed within 24 hours.

General Director of Ru-Center Alexander Panov proposed to launch, in addition to blocking on “black lists,” also filtering the output of information in search engines. The idea was actively supported by Igor Ashmanov, who was present at the meeting. This is where the most interesting thing begins, a bot stands up for Ashmanov, with words typical of a bot. As a result, bad content appears that threatens young people, from which Google and Yandex do not protect them, and therefore SERP must be cleared by the state. (SERP - Search engine results page - a web page generated by a search engine in response to a user's search query.). And on November 1, the apotheosis of this blitzkrieg plan will take place with the introduction into operation and to the fanfare of Roskomnadzor of the “Great Chinese Firewall”, oh Russian, I misspoke, but the meaning does not change now there are two of them, the score is open, who is next?

This product of domestic thought is already being tested in Volgograd. One can only guess what the residents of this city did wrong, although it is worth remembering the incident there with MC Noize. And also apparently because Volgograd has the smallest number of foreign passports per capita. All that remains is until the beginning of November to “agree” with the rest of the market players, such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and those smaller ones. As we can see, the first from the list has already arrived for negotiations and judging by the photo with the donated T-shirt and Medvedev’s smile with parallel statements by the youngest billionaire in the world that he will “protect the copyrights of users,” we can conclude that they have agreed. For what reason, we won’t know, but Facebook, and therefore the search engine Bing, have now also become unsafe for personal correspondence and organizing opposition protests, since it’s difficult to find out who the organizer is and, again, whip up a law on liability for organizing rallies. , at which it is possible to solder an unrealistic amount of fine - will become possible. Since all the moves of the FSB and the Center for Countering Extremism will now be recorded.

Next Google, here the authorities turned on the manual judicial system and took advantage of the resonant excitement around the film “Hate Muslims”. Thus, indirectly, through the Google-owned video service YouTube, Russian law enforcement agencies sent a message to the media giant, and to be completely convincing, on September 28, Google experienced a failure of its Gmail service for “unknown” reasons, which began in RuNet. Further, in several regions of the Russian Federation, access to the YouTube service was completely disabled. The authorities made it clear that this is not the place for you and you will either play by our rules or... YouTube, after the Moscow court’s decision to recognize the film as extremist, responded that it would close access to the film for the Russian segment of the service. The authorities are still leading the score 3:0. Now it's worth watching the Google Inc. office. in Moscow and their statements to the press, since they also have a search engine and their own social network Google+, which also have a bad effect on the sleep of the capital’s riot police.

Also, the order of the Ministry of Transport on electronic monitoring of all passengers in the country recently came into force. What does it mean? But here’s the thing: any movements around the city and country become known immediately to state security and the police. By the way, this applies to taxi companies and transport companies - all data on calls will also go to the ACDPDP.

In the near future, legislators plan to introduce another totalitarian measure, which will finally take away all citizens’ rights to anonymous access to information and take away freedom of expression. That is, 3 more articles of the constitution will be violated. 23, 24 and 29 articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation which say:

Article 23:
1. Everyone has the right to privacy, personal and family secrets, protection of their honor and good name.
2. Everyone has the right to privacy of correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other messages. Restriction of this right is permitted only on the basis of a court decision.

Article 24:
1. Collection, storage, use and dissemination of information about the private life of a person without his consent is not permitted.
2. State authorities and local self-government bodies, their officials are obliged to provide everyone with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with documents and materials that directly affect their rights and freedoms, unless otherwise provided by law.

Article 29:
1. Everyone is guaranteed freedom of thought and speech. 2. Propaganda or agitation that incite social, racial, national or religious hatred and enmity are not permitted. Promotion of social, racial, national, religious or linguistic superiority is prohibited.
3. No one can be forced to express or renounce their opinions and beliefs.
4. Everyone has the right to freely seek, receive, transmit, produce and disseminate information by any legal means. The list of information constituting a state secret is determined by federal law.
5. Freedom of the media is guaranteed. Censorship is prohibited.

In accordance with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as Article 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and Article 29 of the Constitution, which proclaims and guarantees the spiritual, creative freedom of man, expressed in the public unhindered expression of ideas, opinions, beliefs. Without freedom of thought and speech, the ideological diversity of society and the realization of the right to free elections, accompanied by the right to campaign, freedom of scientific research, creativity, and teaching are impossible.

But despite the violation of the constitution, Vice-Speaker of the State Duma United Russia member Sergei Zheleznyak and LDPR deputy Yaroslav Nilov are preparing further amendments to the laws and intend to introduce a draft banning the use of “camouflage” software. Violators may face administrative liability so far only in the form of a fine. For example, with the help of these programs, users in China and Belarus very successfully access those sites to which local authorities block access. In connection with the adoption of these amendments, the Russian segment of the Internet will become the most censored and controlled in the world. In the law being adopted, representatives of the lower house of parliament propose to ban software, that is, proxy servers that are installed on the user’s computer, or browsers with a built-in anonymizer, following the example of the Tor browser. In addition, deputies include web servers as masking tools - autonomous sites with the help of which users can go to a blocked site with a changed IP address without installing special programs. Similar amendments will be made to the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Security”, as well as to the Law “On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development,” which has already undergone major changes this summer. Providers will now have to track where each user went, and if he logged into some kind of anonymizer, used the Tor browser - he can now be taken by the gills for this alone.

And in December 2012, UN member countries will hold a conference on international telecommunications in Dubai, at which Russian President Vladimir Putin will make a proposal for the centralization of control on the Internet, which will become an absolute threat to the existing Internet order and create a complete imbalance of power in the citizen/state context . The proposed amendment will be the last step in a consistent series of measures suppressing freedom and will create a precedent and a terrible example for other countries to introduce a global dictatorship in the media and electronic networks. The authorities will use this agreement as the basis for their supposedly “legitimate” control not only over political rivals, but also over ordinary citizens who are not involved in politics. In this regard, Russian citizens are currently at the forefront of the attack on the targeted and brutal suppression of legal law and human will.

The Pirate Party of Russia, various civil initiatives, as well as international legal organizations monitoring the observance of human rights and freedoms sharply criticized the introduced measures. But the authorities prefer not to notice this. The finale of the citizens’ struggle for their rights today is the Moscow authorities’ ban on holding a rally in defense of freedom on the Internet and condemning censorship and total government control. Are we really going to surrender the last outpost of freedom, and at the same time all our constitutional and fundamental rights without a fight?!

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