Translated material
Battle for Telegram: Operational Summers
Roskomasvoboda continues to provide legal assistance to users and Internet business in appealing unlawful actions and decisions of the Russian special services and Roskomnadzor, and therefore we prepared a digest of all events that took place by this time as part of a public campaign.
Within the framework of the “Battle for Telegram” campaign, Roskomvobod continues to the struggle to protect users and Internet business rights, appealing the unlawful actions and decisions of the Russian special services and Roskomnadzor, who in mid-April of this year, violating the constitutional rights of citizens, blocked the popular Telegram messenger in Russia. Earlier, the owner of the messenger, Pavel Durov, refused to transfer the FSB “encryption keys” for access to user correspondence, as this will make the communication in it unsafe, and also violates confidentiality.
At this point, our lawyers carried out the following actions:
- An administrative statement of claim was submitted to the Moscow City Court to recognize the actions of the FSB of Russia illegal for the demand from Telegram LLP, necessary to decode messages from all users;
- About 50 individual and 1 collective complaint from Russian users were filed to the Investigative Committee of Russia and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation on checking the actions of the management of Roskomnadzor for intentional creation of obstacles in the work of web resources by inclusion of whole subdits of IP addresses in the register;
- An administrative claim was filed in the Moscow Arbitration Court on the recognition of the actions of Roskomnadzor in the inclusion of IP addresses belonging to the British VPN service in a single register.
Next, we present the updated information on how things are in Russian courts and law enforcement at the moment:
1. At the beginning of March 2018, a lawsuit was filed in the Meshchansky Court of Moscow in connection with the requirements of the FSB to provide “information necessary to decode messages from Telegram users” (in fact, “keys” for decryption of all messages). However, on March 22, 2018, the court issued a refusal to accept an administrative claim, referring to the fact that “it does not follow from the content of the lawsuit that the appealed actions violate or otherwise affect the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of administrative plaintiffs”.
Thus, the court did not want to see in such a requirement any violation of users' rights to the secret of correspondence, and immediately refused judicial protection. On April 4, 2018, a private complaint was filed against the court ruling. On May 22 of this year, the Mosgorsud appeal appellate refused to satisfy a private complaint and left the previously issued determination in force. Disagreeing with such conclusions, the lawyers of Roskomvoboda are currently preparing a cassation appeal to the Presidium of the Moscow City Court, which will be filed next week.
2. After registering a complaint in favor of the applicants, as expected, its protracted redirect began to various bodies and instances. Of course, it was immediately obvious that not a single law enforcement and supervisory authority wants to resolve an uncomfortable issue related to the explicit excess of the powers assigned to it. Despite the indication of us when submitting an application for the possible availability of part 2 of Art. 13.18 Administrative Code of the Russian Federation (interference by sites), the production of which refers to the jurisdiction of the police, the Ministry of Internal Affairs for some reason decided that this was not about them, and redirected a complaint to the Prosecutor General.
But the Prosecutor General’s Office once again carefully studied and sent a complaint back to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and what is strange, to Roskomnadzor itself. At the same time, the prosecutor Korolev D.L., who made the decision, was not confused by the situation of paragraph 6 of Art. 8 Federal Law No. 59-ФЗ “On the Procedure for Considering the Appeals of Citizens of the Russian Federation”, prohibiting the complaint to consideration to the state body, local government or official, the decision or action (inaction) of which will be appealed.
As a result, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation nevertheless launched a complaint to the Moscow Central Internal Affairs Directorate of Moscow, from where they reported that on June 11, 2018 the material was still registered in the KUSP and sent to the Moscow Internal Affairs Directorate of Moscow to verify and make a procedural decision.
The Moscow Central Internal Affairs Directorate of Moscow also registered the individual complaints of users by assigning them independent Kusp (a book of accounting for reports about incidents), however, until now he has not notified us or the applicants about the results of the audit.
At the same time, we received a stamped response from Roskomnadzor himself, which, in violation of the law and lowered the complaint through one of the channels. The position of the department boils down to the fact that the hosting providers (read, Azure, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Digital Ocean and others) are to blame for everything and the blocking of a huge amount of resources due to the restriction of access to Telegram is exceptionally their problem. In its position, the RKN, as well as before, the Ministry of Justice , refers to a fairly controversial definition of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation dated 07/17/2014 No. 1759-O, which was made on the complaint of the publisher Kharitonov, whose site was blocked for the company simply for the reason that it was on the same IP address with the site on which illegal information was posted.
Reply to Roskomnadzor → PDF | 3 mb
3. The war unleashed by Roskomnadzor against Telegram, as you know , led to a massive restriction of access from the territory of Russia to many Internet resources and services. Russian business representatives, who at the beginning did not understand at all, were very outraged by such an clumsy law enforcement, because they were directly reflected in their own business, however, as expected, few people eventually reached the trial in order to protect their rights, despite the loud statements in public space. Nevertheless, such were found. In mid-June, the British company Private Networks LP (TGVPN), providing VPN services for a safe Internet connection, as well as public proxy server, appealed to the arbitration court due to the blocking of the IP addresses used by the service.
An interview in the case with the parties was scheduled for 07/19/2018 at 11 o’clock. 20 min. In the courtroom at the address: 115191 Moscow, st. Big Tula, house 17, hall 8076 floor 8.
Considering that the decision on Telegram was made by the Tagansky court with many procedural violations (for example, Roskomnadzor is not at all authorized to file such claims), in the RKN for the untying of large -scale hunting for Telegram and its dynamically changing IP (which allow the messenger to connect) at a time they were stocked up by the decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office No. 27-31-2018/ID2971-18 dated April 16, 2018, which allegedly established “Placement on the channels and accounts of Telegram calls to carry out extremist activities, namely materials that propagate and justify the activities [prohibited in Russia] organizations“ Islamic state of Iraq and Levant ”,“ Jabhat Anusra ”,“ Jabhat Anusra ”,“ “Jabhat Fathu Sham”, “Ahrar al-Sham” and other illegal formations in the territories of the Syrian Arab Republic ” .
In early June, we also made a request to Roskomnadzor to provide a copy of this “rubber” decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office, which the agency used as a basis for blocking millions of IP addresses and resources that are not related to Telegram. Recall, according to the law, the decisions of the Prosecutor General’s Office for locks have a special mechanism of application. They untie the hands of Roskomnadzor, as they allow you to act immediately, without notifying the owner of the site and the hoster, as well as without providing them with the opportunity to delete controversial content. Until now, there has never been an answer. If we never get it from the department, we will have to request it through a court request.
The battle for Telegram continues!
Head of legal practice of Roskomvoboda
Sarkis Darbinyan.
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