Officials and military officers were asked to ban the use of foreign instant messengers and email services

The Ministry of Economic Development proposed to legally prohibit military personnel and government civil servants from using foreign software for transmitting electronic messages for official purposes, Kommersant writes, citing a report prepared by the department for the president with proposals for priority purchases of Russian software and equipment.

Thus, officials and military personnel may be prohibited from conducting work correspondence from mailboxes on Gmail.com and in popular instant messengers WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram.

According to the representative of the Ministry of Economic Development Elena Lashkina, for official purposes it is planned to use only Russian instant messengers, and this position was agreed upon with the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Internet Development Institute (IRI).

The department's report also contains proposals to expand the ban on the purchase of foreign software by government agencies, introduced on January 1, 2016. Thus, the document proposes to extend the ban not only to the direct purchase of software, but also to the purchase of works, services for the creation and maintenance of information systems and the rental of software, and these measures are planned to be extended not only to government agencies, but also to companies with state participation and state monopolies .

The authors of the report propose introducing similar restrictions on the purchase of equipment. If there are domestic analogues, government agencies and state-owned companies may be prohibited from purchasing foreign computer equipment, servers, and telecommunications equipment. Separately, the report proposes to prohibit the use of software and equipment of foreign origin when creating models of weapons, military equipment, as well as “carrying out other work using information constituting a state secret.”

Finally, the ministry’s report proposes to introduce administrative penalties for the purchase of foreign software and equipment. The existence of such proposals became known to the media last week.

The publication notes that, according to the Ministry of Finance, in Russia there are 108 civil servants per 10 thousand people, and the number of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is almost 800 thousand people. Thus, the potential audience of the state messenger, the development of which is proposed to be carried out by Mail.ru and the Internet Development Institute, could be approximately 2.5 million people.

Later, the Kremlin commented on the proposal to ban officials from using instant messengers. According to presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, no decisions have been made to ban the use of instant messengers, and work with official information is regulated by the law on information protection.

“In general, to use for official purposes, which would include official information, especially classified information, this is probably incorrect, and it is absolutely reckless, no matter what the services are - domestic or otherwise. Because none of these services does not provide for protection. No decisions have been made in this direction yet; there is a law on state secrets, on which all instructions for working with data representing state secrets are based,” RIA Novosti quotes Peskov as saying.

Let us recall that recently representatives of the government and law enforcement agencies have repeatedly raised the issue of limiting the use of public email services and instant messengers by officials. Thus, in early May, the head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, Nikolai Nikiforov, warned officials against using instant messengers, and in August last year, Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev sharply criticized officials using foreign services.

Last week it became known that the share of government agencies whose employees use public email services for work is 78%, and for federal authorities this figure is 67%.