Censor at the post

The other day, the deputy head of Roskomnadzor Maxim Ksenzov, responsible for the Internet, received an unexpected Afront from Facebook. In his replica you feel confused:

Great) deleted my message. Well ...

To the question "What was there?" A senior official replied:

Among other things, that crests are sometimes such crests)

Ksenzov was already the second famous victim of the moratorium on the word "Khokhly" - the first was the fiction writer Edward Bagirov.

Probably, Facebook thus responds to accusations of a tendential blocking of Ukrainian and pro -Ukrainian users, for which Mark Zuckerberg was forced to justify personally. But if the robot did this, he would delete Ksenzov’s explanation, which also contains a prohibited word. Be that as it may, the sanction of Facebook administrators was taken by everything as a response to threats to block social networks in Russia for refusing to delete content, objectionable to the Russian authorities, at the request of Roskomnadzor. So before us is the case of exposure, which Maxim Yuryevich so annoyingly sought. With bitter irony, he comments on the removal:

Other things being equal and other nuances, I would not want unknown citizens of famous countries to forbid citizens of my country to speak their native language.

In fact: it is much more fun to be a boss and decide for their fellow citizens what they can and what cannot speak in their native language.

Facebook later blocked the entire Kenzov account. And this can no longer be a demarche. The official of the official clearly violates the Facebook rule about the offensive names of representatives of other ethnic groups (no matter what linguistic experts say), and the rules "all animals are equal, but some are no more equal" in the Charter of the social network.

Nevertheless, the opportunism of global providers of Internet services, their concessions to the growing pressure of the Kremlin, who wants to control the content of social media, - of course, is not news for a long time. One of the very first high -profile examples of such a deflection was a blocking in December last year at the request of Roskomnadzor of the account of the organizers of the rally in support of Alexei Navalny on the Facebook network. The New York Times responded to this event with an editorial article under the heading "Facebook NOT BAZARY START". Its authors had in mind the ancient Greek Agora - the city market, which served as the place of general -civil meetings, so the headline can also be translated as "Facebook is not a place for discussions."

“The decision of Facebook,” the article says, serves as an important reminder that social media companies did not take the obligations to maintain freedom of speech if this support is damaged by their business. ” If Facebook refuses to comply with the requirements of the Russian authorities, the service can be blocked in Russia completely - the company, they say, selects less from two evils.

The newspaper did not justify Facebook. In the article, a critical accent is noticeable - however, only with careful reading.

Indeed, business interests require interaction with foreign governments. The global market for contextual advertising is growing rapidly. Only in the first quarter of this year, Facebook earned $ 3.3 billion on advertising, and more than half of these income was received outside the United States.

In the segment of search advertising, Google remains an unequivocal leader: for the first quarter, advertising brought him 15.5 billion dollars.

You can’t argue with such numbers. But there is something and reputation. Or indeed, "the capitalists themselves will sell us the rope on which we will hang them"?

The blocking of Ukrainian and pro -Ukrainian users of the Facebook network was so massive that it entailed the collective appeal of Ukrainians to Mark Zuckerberg. The case accepted such a serious turnover that the founder of Facebook was forced to personally respond to accusations.

According to Zuckerberg, he studied the issue and believes that in some cases the blocking was justified. Despite the fact that the employees of the Dublin Office Facebook, who speak Russian and Ukrainian, are still not excluded, the errors are not excluded, he admitted, he admitted. As such, he cited the case when the content was recognized as obscene, instead of recognizing him with the "language of enmity." The most interesting thing is that the analysis of the posting in question does not require knowledge of any languages, because this is a picture : Ukrainian journalist Alexander Kapustin published a selfie with Mikhail Saakashvili and provided the image with a signature: "Let's see if they will ban me for this picture." So glittered. Where there is pornography and where the enemy language remains a mystery.

The explanations and excuses of Zuckerberg did not convince anyone, and after this speech he received a petition from Russian and Ukrainian users. The company was engraved by a statement in which it recognized separate excesses. But this recording did not satisfy anyone.

If we turn to the practice of interaction between the leaders of the industry with the US authorities, we will see the opposite phenomenon: a large Internet business provides an increasingly persistent resistance to the state, perfectly understanding that freedom of speech in combination with the confidentiality of personal life is the goods that they trade. If networks of networks become more careful to express sharp and controversial opinions, advertising sales will fall.

An example of resistance was given by the general director of Apple Tim Cook. In February of this year, he, from the rostrum of the White House of the Cybersecurity summit, turned to the US President with a call to abandon the requirements that violate the right of customers to inviolable private life. “We still live in a world where everyone is not the same,” said Cook, publicly announced last year that he is gay. “Too many cannot openly confess their faith, express their opinion or love someone from their choice. This is a world where access to information can become a matter of life and death.”

“The virtual world is something like a wild West, and we need to become a sheriff to a certain extent from us,” Barack Obama answered him and signed a decree that encourages private companies to exchange information between themselves and with state bodies.

But more than Cook's words, the federal government annoy his affairs. Last year, Apple developed a new smartphone data protection system - access to them is possible only using a password that the company itself does not know, and therefore cannot provide it with the authorities. Google began to encrypt the correspondence of his customers. American security forces are extremely unhappy with this. The FBI Director James Komi demands to remove protection from all mobile devices and applications, leave the “window” through which the agents of the bureau can familiarize themselves with their contents, or provide the GOLDEN KEY FBI - a universal master key. According to Komi, the providers "put the law upside down with their tricks with their tricks and essentially cover terrorists and pedophiles. The Minister of Justice Loretta Lynch claims that providers interfere with justice and this inspires her with “deep concern”.

This position, of course, is shared by the director of the National Security agency Admiral Mike Rogers - he demands from Congress to oblige the company to cooperate with the government. In one of the public discussions, experts tried to explain to him that cryptography is "all or nothing." “To leave a loophole in the cipher is like perforating the windshield,” Yahoo security chief Alex Stammos told Admiral. In addition, he continued a tenmos, why would the governments of other countries not demand the same from providers? "Do we have to do the same for the governments of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, France?"

Rogers replied that he believes that the technical solution is possible. The admiral denied that the ANB broke the internal network of the largest American manufacturer SIM cards to acquire his own universal master key to ciphers, which was reported with reference to a new leakage from Edward Snowden.

In mid-May, Barack Obama received an appeal signed by 140 the largest high-tech companies, experts and human rights organizations. Its authors convince the president to reject any proposals of their subordinates aimed at destroying the safety of communications - the "cornerstone" of the industry.

Congress, which recently extended with a creak (with cosmetic amendments that allowed lawmakers to save a face) the powers of the NSA to collect metadata - information about telephone conversations of all Americans without exception - plays a passive role in this polemic. But last month, two members of the lower house - Republican Will Hard and Democrat Ted Li - sent a letter to the director of the FBI, which expressed their categorical disagreement with the demand of the government to weaken the protection of gadgets and services. Hard and Liu (two of the total four members of the Congress, who have higher education in the specialty "Computer Technologies") write that this measure, firstly, will weaken the competitiveness of American goods and services, secondly, not only law enforcement agencies, but also hackers, and third criminals will use the "master. Foreign manufacturers who are not required to obey the laws of the United States.

The message remains unanswered.

For some time, wanting to strengthen the consumer’s trust and protect themselves from accusations of too efficient cooperation with the governments, Internet companies publish regular “transparency reports”, which contain information about the requests of government agencies to delete content, as well as about personal data of users. As the Google report, in the second half of last year, the company satisfied 78 percent of the requests for the provision of data received from the US government. Requests of state bodies for removal of content (this is data for the second half of 2013) were completed by 23 percent.

At the same time, it must be taken into account that the company fulfills only requests confirmed by the judicial agenda, the court order or the order for the search, which is also issued by the court. And far from necessarily these requests are satisfied in full. It is said about foreign governments that they should contact the US Department of Justice, which will act in the manner prescribed by law.

Similar explanations contain Facebook report. However, an important addition: when considering the requests of foreign governments to block an account or removal of content, the company is guided by local legislation: if, say, the denial of the Holocaust is prohibited in Germany, then Facebook is blocking the content that violates this ban for German users.

But any law should be implemented? The blog in the support of Navalny, which was discussed above, was blocked according to the same " Lugovoi Law " as the City.ru. Under this law, a court decision is not required - blocking is carried out on the proposal of the Prosecutor General. As it turned out from the trial, Roskomnadzor does not know the reasons for blocking the "faces", and the Prosecutor General’s office refuses to call them, although it is obliged by law.

Twitter in this regard is the most worthy tracking list : for the second half of 2014, he received 91 query from Russia to remove content (of which only two by the court decision), of which he satisfied 13 percent. Requests of the American government were satisfied for the same period zero percent. No wonder Maxim Ksenzov was especially inspired by Twitter!

In the general opinion, the state loses to manufacturers and providers in a public struggle. Now it’s hard to imagine that the Obama administration will be able to push the bill on the forced lifting of the defense in the congress. According to the report of the International Organization for the Protection of Digital Rights Electronic Frontier Foundation, American companies as a whole are responsible for protecting the confidentiality and freedom of speech of their users and are ready, if necessary, defend their position in court.

Providers reports do not contain statistics from removal and blocking of content on complaints of users about violations of the networks of networks - it is precisely this tool that uses the Kremlin in the fight against the Internet -opposition, which flooded social networks with its trolls. Russian investigation organs are charged not even for original content, but for repost, not at all complicating itself with linguistic subtleties. But in the United States on June 1, the Supreme Court 7 votes against 2 issued a decision in the Elonis against the United States. The plaintiff Anthony Elonis was sentenced to 44 months in prison for threats at the address of his ex-wife, an FBI agent and first-graders published on Facebook. However, the members of the Supreme Court, having studied the texts presented, came to the conclusion that this is literary work: Elonis was often self -exposed in the form of rap. (In the texts of Eminem there are statements more care.) The court found that there are poems, and not real threats, and canceled the verdict . American experts consider this court decision to an important precedent.