Translated material
Chronicle of Runet filtering No. 18 May 9-13, 2016
Jehovah's Witness fails to appeal fine
The Kirov Regional Court in April approved the decision of the Kirovo-Chepetsk District court that fined the head of the local community of Jehovah's Witnesses for distributing links to a banned website of a religious organization.
On May 10, 2016 it became known that on April 7, 2016 the Kirov Regional the court upheld the decision of the Kirovo-Chepetsky District Court, who on February 16, 2016 fined the chairman of the Kirovo-Chepetsk local religious organization of Jehovah's Witnesses Roman Pinegin for 2,000 rubles under Art. 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (distribution of extremist materials and their storage for the purpose of distribution).
The reason was that Pinegin published in the social network "Odnoklassniki" a link to the official website of Jehovah's Witnesses, which was banned as extremist and included in the Federal List of Extremist materials. Pinegin tried to appeal the decision of the district court in the regional, however, his complaint was dismissed.
SOVA Center Considers Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses and the banning of their texts under the pretext of fighting extremism as a religious discrimination.
In March 2008, Rosobrazovanie (later abolished and reorganized into Ministry of Education and Science) supplied all Russian schools with licensed software packages software, which includes a content filtering program for access to Internet. As it turned out, this program does not cope with the task, which was found out as a result of prosecutorial checks throughout the country.
It is obvious that the blame for the fact that schoolchildren, despite access filters, have the ability to visit neo-Nazi and other inappropriate sites, lies not only with schools that do not update with the necessary regularity of the software, but also on the Ministry of Education and Science, which established insufficiently effective product. Moreover, the very idea of fighting help filters with extremism in schools seems wrong: any filter can to be bypassed if desired, but to compile an exhaustive list of addresses and key words are basically impossible.
However, prosecutors everywhere and regularly punish local officials and school leaders. The SOVA Center believes that for the imperfection of the content filtering system must comply with the Ministry of Education and Science, and the negligence of the leadership of schools that do not update the program is more of a problem labor discipline than law enforcement.
On May 10, 2016, the prosecutor's office of the Altai Republic reported that the prosecutor's office Chemalsky district, a submission was made to the director of the local school. The reason was, in particular, that installed on school computers the content filtering system did not function properly, "because children had access to videos of the preparation of explosives substances, Internet sites with obscene content". To disciplinary official was held liable.
Kemerovo prosecutor's office blocked the anonymizer
On May 13, 2016, the Kemerovo Region Prosecutor's Office reported that the Central the district court of Kemerovo satisfied the requirements of the district prosecutor's office to block hosted on one of the sites of the " program ", with the help of which it was possible to go to the forbidden site of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Obviously, such a program means a certain site-anonymizer. Anonymizers do not themselves contain any prohibited information. Access to prohibited materials can be carried out through other tools, including number through a regular search engine, since removing them from the global network has not yet fully succeeded - however, such a possibility is not a basis for blocking access to search engines. In this regard, the Center "Sova" consider the decision to block the anonymizer unlawful, as well as the ban of the site itself Jehovah's Witnesses.
Earlier it became known that the district prosecutor's office in Murmansk demanded block 13 anonymizers. Anapa City Court in 2015 and 2016 made decisions to block the NoBlock anonymizer and a number of similar services
Roskomnadzor will be able to get the right to select domain names in the .ru and .rf zones
At the end of May 2016, the Coordinating Center for the national domain of the network Internet (KC) may give Roskomnadzor the right to out-of-court separate domain names of sites in ".ru" and ".rf" zones, through which the sale of drugs or propaganda of their use is carried out, and dissemination of extremist materials. According to the official representative of the department Vadim Ampelonsky, there are about 800 such sites.
Currently, domain partitioning can be done registrar for providing false information about the administrator, on on the basis of a written decision of the head of the "body exercising operational-search activity", as well as in cases of detection competent organization for phishing incidents, botnet management and distribution of child pornography through the site.
The proposed measure appears to be excessive. Center experts "Sova" fear that the use of such a mechanism of extrajudicial restricting access to information can result in abuse and attack on freedom of speech.
Bills to tighten measures to counter terrorism and extremism were approved in the first reading
On May 13, 2016, during the plenary session, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a package of two bills on combating terrorist and extremist activity, introduced on April 7, 2016 by a member of the Council Federation by Viktor Ozerov and deputy Irina Yarovaya. Bills provide for a sharp increase in penalties for crimes of terrorist and extremist orientation, and also contain a number of innovations procedural nature.
Among the measures proposed by Yarovaya and Ozerov, the abolition of all types of punishment in addition to imprisonment under most anti-extremist articles, the introduction penalties for involvement in extremist activities and for failure to report terrorist activities (including for teenagers), deprivation of citizenship for involvement in terrorist activities for recently received citizenship and vice versa travel restrictions for native citizens convicted of anti-terrorist and anti-extremist articles, until the conviction (and even for those who received a warning about the inadmissibility of terrorist activities, genocide, unleashing a war, etc. - for five years), as well as equalization the Internet to the media in the sense of the danger of speaking out for an article about propaganda terrorism. In addition, according to the intention of the legislators, investigators should be access to electronic communications of the suspect for a period of three years before the decision on admission is made and, accordingly, telecom operators should oblige to store all communications materials, from texts to videos, for three previous years.
The legal department of the State Duma formulated a number of comments on the bills. The Supreme Court criticized the draft law on amendments to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, in particular in connection with the toughening of punishments for crimes of an extremist orientation. The Russian government approved the second bill, calling only for a reduction in the storage of correspondence of citizens. The Human Rights Council under the President of Russia criticized both bills.
The SOVA Center believes that the Russian law enforcement practice has not revealed prerequisites for tightening measures to combat extremism, because at the moment the prosecution almost never asks maximum penalties under the relevant articles. The introduction of unnecessarily cruel measures of punishment in general leads only to an increase in tension in society. Fighting extremism and even terrorism does not require or justify new measures, yet more restrictive and so overly limited in Russia rights - to freedom words, creeds, information, privacy and freedom of movement.