October 10, 2019

Delete forever: Russians face an internet ban

topic:	Security
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

On Wednesday, Russian Parliament opened a discussion of the bill, which envisages banning citizens from access to the internet if they are caught with exchanging "harmful" email messages.

The bill has been introduced by the senator Andrei Klishas, notorious for his restless efforts to control every bit of information exchange in this country.

Klishas suggested punishing both the email service providers (with a fine of one million rubles, or $15,300) and the users (with a life ban of entering the Web). He told the Parliament that it would be "more practical" to "delete" senders themselves instead of filtering their messages. To make those operations possible, Klishas suggested giving the communication watchdog Roskomnadzor a right to read private correspondence - the offer directly violating the constitutional privacy guarantees. Klishas did not specify what information could be counted as "harmful" for the Russian state security and public order.

That omission, along with technical issues, renders his bill unrealisable, a partner in the B2Chain consulting agency Anton Merkulov believes. "No one in Russia is surprised anymore that lawmakers attempt to violate the laws at every turn. What remains surprising is their stunning illiteracy as they have not the faintest idea - or they just don't care - that such bills will be impossible to enable", he says. According to Merkulov, there are no tools to open someone else's electronic correspondence because email services generate one-time encryption keys automatically, so even if the mail service is willing to give them out to the censors, it is unable to do so. "In 2018, the Federal Security Service, FSB, attempted to oblige the Telegram online messenger to share similar information but failed, and after a few months of fruitless attempts, gave up. Thus, Klishas' bill brings about nothing new in the practice of censorship in Russia", Merkulov says.

All initiatives such as this one make life a burden for the common citizens but they fail to reach their objectives, leading analyst in the Russian Electronic Communications Association, Karen Kazaryan, agrees. "Even if to suggest that the Roskomnadzor blocks a certain mailbox or its owner, the user immediately creates a new one, or a dozen, or a hundred. Similarly, if the authorities block the mail service, its owners may create new ones buying a free domain name for five dollars", he says. "We all suffer from spam messages and still are unable to end them, because those messages have been sent by spambots with no human involvement. There's no difference what sort of messages the spam bots disseminate, commercial advertising or 'harmful' political information - it's impossible to stop", Kazaryan points out.

In late September, Russian authorities started to assemble equipment designed to cut off Russian users from the worldwide web.