The secret service chose a good time to hide from public scrutiny

The topic of coronavirus has recently captured everyone's attention. Nothing surprising when it comes to the pandemic and the global economic crisis. However, against this background, it became somehow awkward to draw public attention to other issues that until recently were of paramount importance on the social agenda.

Isn't this the best moment for the authorities to quietly, as they say, "on the sly", introduce those initiatives that in calm times could cause a wave of discontent and protest in society?

For example, last week, on April 2, on the official portal of draft regulations, a draft presidential decree “On Amendments to the List of Information on the Activities of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation Placed on the Internet, Approved by the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation” was published dated August 10, 2011 No. 1075”.

The appearance of the project caused a rather weak reaction in the media, they wrote about it casually in one line, and the emphasis was not on the most important points.

Of course, now the draft decree regulating the openness of executive bodies is not the most important topic,

but the pandemic will end sooner or later, and the decree, the draft of which was submitted for discussion until April 16, will remain with us for a long time to come.

So what should you pay attention to before it's too late?

The FSB has never met the openness criteria that have been in place since 2003.

I will tell you below about how the Institute for the Development of Information Freedom, which I headed in the past, once fought against this. I will also note here that this draft decree is an attempt to bring the law into line with law enforcement practice, which is expressed in violation of the constitutional right of citizens to access information about the activities of government bodies and the possibility of exercising this right through the use of information technologies.

Information indicated in the project as not mandatory for posting on the FSB websites:

• organ structure;

• information about the tasks and functions of territorial divisions;

• other information about the leadership of the FSB, with the exception of the full name;

• information about the establishment of mass media and their financing;

• departmental regulatory legal acts (NLA);

• draft laws under development, presidential decrees, government resolutions and their legal acts affecting the rights and freedoms of citizens;

• information on the recognition by the court of illegal departmental acts;

• information on international activities (contracts within the competence of the FSB);

• information about management trips and official events;

• information on public procurement;

• the procedure and results of the activities of intradepartmental anti-corruption commissions.

The following points deserve special attention in this list.

Departmental regulatory legal acts

The fact that they will become less accessible if the project is adopted is objectively bad.

The public will not be able to get acquainted with the powers of the special services on the FSB website, which means they will not be able to assess the legitimacy of its actions. This can lead to permissiveness.

According to the current legislation, departmental legal acts must be officially published. Laws affecting the rights and freedoms of citizens cannot be applied in practice if they have not been officially published. This rule is enshrined in Art. 15 of the Constitution, which is located in the first chapter, is the Fundamentals of the constitutional order, which emphasizes the importance of the availability of legal information.

For the official publication of the legal acts of various authorities, including the FSB, there is an official Internet portal of legal information on the Internet, where you can still find the legal acts of the FSB. However, the FSB's initiative to free itself from the obligation to post adopted legal acts on its official website may be the first step towards the complete secrecy of its legal information.

Draft federal laws under development

The desire of law enforcement agencies to hide their legislative activity is quite understandable. The fact is that all security officials, as a rule, come up with the most unpopular initiatives in society aimed at restricting the rights of citizens. Recall, for example, the “Yarovaya law”, a petition against which collected more than 600 thousand signatures, and a series of protest rallies took place across the country.

Despite the fact that formally the draft law came out under the authorship of a State Duma deputy, according to my information, its development was carried out by order and under the control of special services.

Now the law enforcement agencies have decided to completely legalize this practice and cover up their initiatives in order to make them easier to implement, if possible, smuggling them unnoticed. We did not know before what bills the FSB lobbied, now this restriction is going to be prescribed in a presidential decree.

The procedure and results of the activities of intradepartmental anti-corruption commissions

The desire to hide this information is dictated by the desire of the FSB to hide the facts of the illegal activities of the corrupt nature of its employees.

But this is precisely the very information to which the public, not unreasonably, has a special interest. At the same time, according to the Federal Law "On ensuring access to information on the activities of state bodies and local governments", all departments are required to publish this information. So why should an exception be made for the FSB?

Governments love to be formal, so laws that force them to do something inconvenient are annoying.

And for such a special service as the FSB, this is a significant irritating factor, because they never adhered to the rules of information openness.

There was no tradition of transparency in this department. This decree is needed so that the security forces get the opportunity to formally not comply with those requirements that are inconvenient for the department, but convenient for society as a preventive measure to protect against the arbitrariness of the special services.

But in this story, one more extremely important point should be taken into account: first, certain information can be removed from the category of proactively disclosed, and then some of it can be completely classified.

That is, after the adoption of the draft of this decree, we can expect a decree to make all the above information related to the activities of the FSB inaccessible to citizens not only on the Internet, but also upon the usual written request to the department.

And this means that, being completely closed, the department will be able to act uncontrollably, significantly expanding the arsenal of its capabilities to restrict the rights of citizens.