Eye of the sovereign censorship

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The war in Ukraine has been going on for 365 days. The Russian authorities were preparing for it, not only transferring the troops to the border, but also cleaning the information space to cut off Russians from publications that contradict the official position. After the start of the war, almost all independent media were recognized by foreign agents and blocked in Russia. And the list of foreign agents is still weekly replenished with new names of independent journalists, opposition, activists, actors, musicians and others.

However, for large -scale cleansing, Roskomnadzor (RKN) did much more than you can learn from their public registers of objectionable power sources of information. “Important stories” gained access to the largest leakage of data in the history of the country's main censorship department - “documents of Russian censorship”. Journalists studied more than two million internal documents, images and letters of the subsidiary of the RKN - “Main Radio Frequency Center” (GRCHC). It is the GRCHC who is engaged in the monitoring of the Internet, the preparation of certificates for foreign agents and reports on the “prohibited information” found, as well as blocks.

We tell how the structures of Roskomnadzor on the eve of and during the war stamped certificates for recognition of Russians by foreign agents, the media were blocked in dozens, participated in information campaigns against people who were objectionable to the authorities, and for the right ones, we cleaned the unflattering publications about them.

In this text you will learn:

To whom Roskomnadzor prepared certificates for recognition by a foreign agent and why these people are still not entered in the official register;

how RKN is trying to censor IT giants (YouTube, Google, etc.);

with whom are the locks coordinated;

How RKN participates in information campaigns against people who are objectionable to the authorities.

Who hacked Roskomnadzor and why shared data with reporters? Read more about the "Documents of Russian Censorship"

In November 2022, the Belarusian group of Cyberpartisana hackers said that they hacked the internal network of the GRCC and pumped documents, correspondence and mail of employees, as well as a system for surveillance of them for more than two terabytes. As evidence, they showed screenshots of the correspondence of employees in instant messengers, by mail and internal documents with tasks. Cyber ​​Partizans also claimed to have violated the work of the GRCC, encrypting the workstations. The fact of cyber attacks was confirmed in the very center, but it was noted that the hackers "did not gain access to closed information or to critical infrastructure." According to Cyberpartisan, the materials they received prove "large -scale surveillance and control over everyone who has spoke out against the Putin regime over the past twenty years."

Hactivists remained inside the GRCHC system for many months before they were discovered. No one paid attention to cyber partisan, while they followed all the staff and what they did. After the announcement of the hacking, the hackers still had access to internal correspondence. They said that they saw panic both among the leadership and administrators, and among ordinary employees. Employees were afraid that their data would sell or make them public.

All that Cyberpartisans were able to get when hacking, they handed over to the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung to the German publication, and other Russian media. The leak is called the “Documents of Russian Censors” (Russian CensorsorFiles).

According to the hackers, they chose the RKN to attack because the department is "the most important element of the Russian repressive machine." “They monitor everything and everything on the Internet, and as soon as they see any violations, send this information directly to the FSB, Rosgard, the Federal Security Service, etc., so that their agents are promptly sent to the region, where the potential threat of regime stability is growing. The regime successfully suppresses any alternative movements or even thoughts of disobedience, ”Süddeutsche Zeitung“ Partizans ”explained their position to journalists.

Hackers from Cyberpartisan united in the team in 2020 during large -scale protests against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. In an interview with the BBC Russian Service, they said that everyone had extensive experience in the IT sector, but none of them had previously been engaged in political activism. “Our friends and relatives are killed, tortured and raped. No one will be able to sit aside, ”hackers published such a statement on the website of the Belarusian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and announced the start of their team. Since then, Cyber ​​Partizans organized cyber attacks on the system of the Belarusian railway, received data from the country's own security management of the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs and the audio recordings of wiretaps of security forces and officials. And after the start of the full -scale invasion of Russia, they stated that "they were ready to assist in the fight against the fascist campaign to invade fraternal Ukraine." “At this moment significant for our peoples, it is important to combine efforts and show that together we are able to repulse the tyrants who want to drown our countries in the blood,” their statement said the day after the start of the invasion. After that, the number of hacktivists in the "Cyber ​​Partizan" doubled - from 30 to 60 people.

"It is not possible to establish the logic of introduction to the register of [foreign agents]

The first five foreign agents appeared in the official registry on December 28, 2020. Three journalists, human rights activist and actor artist were included in the list. Prior to this, only non -profit organizations and some media were recognized as foreign agents. In making a decision on who exactly will become a foreign agent, the last word behind the Ministry of Justice. It is there that certificates from Roskomnadzor are sent to candidates for “Motherland”, as well as data on transactions where any amount received from abroad is important, even if it is a gift from a relative.

Although the Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that the foreign agency does not bear any restrictions, this status is a real discrimination . Experts refuse to communicate with reporters, advertisers are leaving the media. In addition, both individuals and organizations should report in detail about their expenses and mark each of its public communication with the phrase that it was created by a foreign agent. Any violation of the law leads to a fine, and later criminal liability. In the first quarter of 2021, the media-foreign agents were fined 79 million rubles, follows from the RKN report.

After the first five, the Ministry of Justice slowed down until July 7, 2021. And after this date, the recognition of Russians in foreign agents turned into a conveyor. Now the new foreign agents are included in the list every week on Fridays, and there are already more than two hundred people there. However, as “important stories” found out, this is only a small part of those who followed Roskomnadzor and made certificates for them to recognize foreign agents.

In the leakage of the GRCC data, journalists of “important stories” found lists of people and organizations at which the department employees made such certificates. Some of them have already been used by the Ministry of Justice to recognize Russians by foreign agents, some are still waiting in the wings.

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Why were the certificates drawn up in 2021 have not yet been used for its intended purpose? Even the employees of Roskomnadzor do not know for sure. In one of the reports on prepared certificates for recognizing people, the media and other legal entities, foreign agents said that in a year (from October 2020 to October 2021), employees prepared 704 certificates (including media, legal entities and individuals and unregistered associations and movements). And then the author of the report notes that “the logic of entering into the registers [foreign agents] remains not entirely clear, since, for example, from the entire number of requests for the preparation of certificates regarding participants in the Voice movement or opposition publications“ project. Media ”and“ Important stories ”are not included in the register.” Employees could not establish logic, but suggested that “opposition activity, a conflict between the publication and the official, etc., became the determining factor,”

Also in the leak there were official requests from the Ministry of Justice: to prepare “in the possible way” of certificates for certain people, according to which the ministry itself decided to conduct an audit.

The database of leakage “Documents of Russian censorship” was updated, we added new names to the table.

In total, “important stories” managed to detect the names of 940 people in the leak, according to which the GRCC from 2020 to 2022 collected information for recognition by foreign agents. 149 people from this list have already been included in the official register. However, the number of potential foreign agents can be much larger, since not all documents of the GRCHC and RKN fell into a leak.

In addition to preparing certificates, GRCC employees are also engaged in surveillance of so -called scraps - leaders of public opinion. The lists of scraps include 472 people with a description of the type of activity and links to all available accounts on social networks.

So far, surveillance of people and the media to recognize foreign agents and blocking mainly in manual mode. According to the internal report of the GRCC, current efforts only from the beginning of the full -scale invasion of Russia to Ukraine “Presching more than 136 thousand illegal materials aimed at destabilizing the Russian society against the background of a special military operation in Ukraine, including those containing inaccurate socially significant information, as well as calls for mass unrest”. In addition, “it was limited to access to 68 sites of Russian opposition resources <...> and to more than 540 Ukrainian sites.”

In the future, Roskomnadzor plans to automatically monitor accounts in social networks of recognized and potential foreign agents and scraps. As well as determine the theme of all articles that will fall into the field of view of the developed automated systems for the Internet moneting in order to further block “dangerous” resources. To teach an automatic monitoring program, the RKN employees use sites of the media that have already been recognized by foreign agents to search for such resources.

Malicious violators of the Russian law and order

“Russia is bombing residential buildings”, “Russian conscripts in Ukraine”, “The atrocities of the Russian military in Buch” - issuing these and similar search queries in Yandex and Google very different. About how different search engines answer the questions of Russians about the war “Important Stories” wrote in the summer. Thanks to the leak, one can understand why this is happening. One of the reports of the RKN states that Yandex and Mail fully fulfill the requirements to remove the “illegal” content from the issuance of “illegal” content, and Google has “filtering of search results at 70–80%”.

Another “headache” of the RKN - YouTube. “At the moment, the YouTube video hosting is almost completely ignoring the numerous requirements to remove illegal content, <...> while limiting access not only to the official accounts of the Russian state media, but also to the accounts of the official authorities of the Russian Federation,” the GRCC officers wrote in the report. YouTube, like many sites, uses the HTTPS protocol, which means that you cannot block a separate “objectionable” video RKN - you will have to block the entire YouTube domain. And this can cause public outcry. Here is what the representatives of the Kaspersky Secure Connection wrote about this, the only VPN that fulfills the RKN requirements: “If you are blocked on YouTube, the entire domain will be blocked. We will get a lot of appeals to the support from users. ”

RKN has a list of “significant resources”, access to which is not blocked , even if they violate the legislation. In the pre -war list: popular Russian and foreign social networks - VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC website and Daily Mail, AliExpress and many others. In the column “Other significant resources” three popular porn sites and “Radio Liberty” are made.

After the start of the war, the list of “inviolable” changed , and a new column appeared in the reports: “Significant resources, access to which is blocked.” Now it has Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Radio Liberty sites. The reason for blocking social networks is “statements by META representatives about permission to publish calls for violence against Russian military personnel, Russian citizens.”

In August, the GRCHC employees prepared a certificate of all unlotted sites, it included 82 resources with more than 47 thousand URLs, which should be limited to access. Most links (37.5 thousand) from the 398-ФЗ Register , that is, extremist materials or inaccurate information about the use of the Russian armed forces, the rest of the unified automated information system (EAIS) “Unified Register” -materials about suicide, drugs, pornographic and other prohibited materials. Links to this register are made by decision of state bodies: Prosecutor General, ships, Ministry of Internal Affairs, FSB, RKN and others.

Most of all “forbidden” links were published by Telegram, YouTube and VKontakte. At the same time, VKontakte has a majority of references from the EAIS register, and the Telegram and YouTube have extremist materials. Due to the “significance of resources”, RKN cannot block them and requires employees to “achieve the removal of prohibited information”.

Employees of the GRCC coordinate “upstairs”, fearing a public reaction. To do this, in the certificate about the site that got into the “Unified Register” of resources containing prohibited information, the mandatory section is filled in - “Additional actions before the access restriction”. This may be the coordination of the blocking with the Prosecutor General, the presidential administration, the deputy head of the RKN and the alert of the press service of the RKN. If any of these actions is required, an employee of the GRCC must mention it.

So, the blocking of the news about the claim of the director of the Caucasian reserve against the journalist of the INSIder publication on the website of the Center for Media Protection of Rights of the GRCC Maxim Milanov proposes to coordinate the deputy head of Roskomnadzor. Limiting access to a poem published on the subdomain of the site of the Sejm Republic, starting with the words “Do Russian wars want? Do not ask the silence, do not ask those soldiers, in the memorials that they lie ... ”, the same employee proposed to coordinate not only from the deputy head of Roskomnadzor, but also with the presidential administration. ‎

Special assassins: "Colleagues ... you can complain"

In addition to the task of blocking the resource or to achieve from it the removal of “prohibited” information, another unofficial task also fell on the RKN employees. Periodically they received requests from management with special assignments. So, in the fall of 2020, from the head of the control and supervision department in the field of electronic communications of the RKN Evgenia Zaitsev, a special order was received. He sent a link to the air in the program “Vesti. The duty unit on the channel “Russia”, during which photographs of the naked minor daughter of the historian, researcher of the Stalinist repressions and the head of the Karelian “memorial” Yuri Dmitrieva were shown. In 2016, during a search on the computer of Dmitriev, the security forces found photos of his adoptive daughter without clothes. Dmitriev made them to fix the state of health of the child for guardianship authorities, the new newspaper said . The historian was sentenced to three and a half years in a maximum security colony in the case of violent acts of a sexual nature in relation to the daughter. In 2020, the deadline was tightened up to 13 years. Three days before this decision, a photo of Dmitriev’s daughter appeared on social networks, and after it was shown on the air on the channel “Russia” with the words that “the Internet is boiling with indignation”, and users “call the sentence in three and a half years in prison to the pedophile who broke the life of the child.” The Memorial considers Dmitriev’s case unequivocally political, and in support of the historian, Nobel laureates, foreign scientists and Russian cultural figures were expressed in support of the historian.

Zaitsev sent a link to this program to the RKN to this program with the words that this is an “extremely resonance topic” and “in the event that there are complaints/letters regarding this topic, to send me right away and do nothing without coordination!” “If they believe that these are pornographic products, as they say, then it turns out to be distributed, and the channel has committed a crime. The same thing that Yuri Alekseevich is accused of now, ” said Dmitriev’s lawyer Viktor Anufriev. However, Roskomnadzor did not find violations of the rights of the reception of Dmitriev’s daughter in a demonstration of her photographs.

The same Evgeny Zaitsev in 2019 controlled the implementation of another “special task”, which consisted “in restricting access to materials with a negative orientation of the [businessman] Ruben Tatulyan. Негативная информация про Татуляна разделена на 4 тематики: Санкции США, Семья, Чехия и Криминальный мир…» В рамках этой задачи сотрудники должны были ежедневно писать и отправлять «доклады по Татуляну» руководству. Несмотря на то что «негативную» информацию об авторитетном бизнесмене Татуляне вычищали как минимум два года (2019–2020), в интернете все равно можно узнать о его связях с криминальным миром и спонсорстве «Единой России». В одном из писем сотрудники ссылаются на определение Таганского районного суда, позволяющее им блокировать материалы про Татуляна. Однако на сайте суда есть только решение о признании нескольких частей из одной статьи про Татуляна недействительными и порочащими его честь и достоинство.

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Еще одно поручение по удалению информации пришло в 2019 году от заместителя руководителя Роскомнадзора Вадима Субботина. Оно касалось новости о смерти замкомандира президентского полка Романа Лотвина. Ее опубликовали многие провластные издания, например РИА «Новости» и «Вечерняя Москва». Сотрудники РКН составили список всех изданий и написали «справку по результатам поиска первоисточника информационного повода». Первоисточником оказалось издание Mash, и только на нем до сих пор осталась новость о возможном самоубийстве Лотвина. На каком основании все остальные СМИ удалили материалы и почему такое поручение дал Субботин, из писем выяснить не удалось.

Вероятно, Вадим Алексеевич Субботин в 2020 году обратился к сотрудникам ГРЧЦ с еще одной очень важной задачей для обеспечения «стабильности государства» (согласно миссии РКН, описанной во внутренних документах ведомства, именно этим они занимаются). «Поступило поручение от ВА массово завалить жалобами видеоролик. <...> Подключи региональных спецов пожалуйста», — говорится в переписке руководителей ГРЧЦ. Просьба «завалить жалобами» стала рассылаться дальше по отделам. Руководители просили «организовать минимум по одной жалобе от каждого вашего сотрудника» и обязательно отчитаться, сколько человек пожаловалось и сколько жалоб ушло. «Коллеги… можно жаловаться», — подытожил один из участников переписки. Жалобы сотрудники РКН кидали по всем площадкам: Youtube, «ВКонтакте», «Одноклассники», «Яндекс.Эфир». А поводом для такого переполоха стало интервью певицы Наргиз в программе «День со звездой» Дениса Ковальского. Во время интервью певица, судя по всему, саркастически выбрала между фото продюсера Максима Фадеева и Адольфа Гитлера последнего. Наргиз перестала сотрудничать с Фадеевым и обвиняла его продюсерский центр в своей травле. За момент же с фото Гитлера на Наргиз обрушился гнев эксперта комиссии по СМИ Общественной палаты России Вадима Манукяня в паре с продюсером Иосифом Пригожиным. А сотрудники РКН по просьбе руководства массово жаловались на видео за «пропаганду фашизма».

Роскомнадзор, ГРЧЦ и Brand Analytics не ответили на запрос «Важных историй» и Süddeutsche Zeitung с просьбой прокомментировать материалы утечки.

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