Mr Putin’s New Censors
The Russian authorities have two way of stopping citizens viewing content they dislike: formal and informal. Let’s start with the formal.
Russian law and legal procedures are totally non-transparent when it comes to repressive measures taken against websites. The usual accusation is that content is “extremist”, a vague term that covers almost anything the authorities want to suppress. Often site owners and administrators are not informed in advance of court proceedings which can result in a blocking order, meaning the site is not represented to plead in its defense. I think it’s obvious which way the court rules in these instances. In proceedings where the state is the plaintiff, the chances of the defendant obtaining a not guilty verdict are close to zero, even with legal representation.
The law relating to web content at the moment raises more questions than it answers. We usually presume that it is criminals who exploit loopholes in the law to evade justice. In our case, though, it is the prosecuting agencies such as the Russian Federal Procurator, the Interior Ministry and Roskomnadzor, the communications regulator, which use ambiguities in the law to the maximum disadvantage of website owners. And the courts go along with them, ignoring serious procedural flaws in the evidence presented by investigating and prosecuting agencies.
Under current rules, when law enforcement agencies find materials on a site which they consider “extremist” or in violation of the law in other ways, they have to submit them for expert linguistic analysis. The law states the expert must be independent, but in most cases the prosecution uses a specialist from the Interior Ministry’s Expert Criminological Centre (ECC). I am not in a position to judge the level of the ECC’s professional expertise, though I presume its specialists are sufficiently qualified to carry out a linguistic analysis. The point is, though, that they are a part of the criminal justice system and so cannot, de facto, be considered independent experts.
Should the expert evaluation conclude that materials on a site do constitute a violation of Russian law, the case is sent to court. Almost always the court will find for the prosecution and declare the content illegal. At this point things get interesting.
One. The court is under no obligation to invite the owners of the site to plead in their defense. I doubt the courts make any attempt to find them. Especially since the identity of many domain owners is hidden behind a proxy and, consequently, the who is service doesn’t provide any usable contact information. This means that owners of sites which come under scrutiny will not even be aware of court proceedings. They often discover their site is blocked only after their users start complaining. And when they do find out, the time allowed by the law to appeal the verdict has expired.
Two. The court’s verdict may not give a full, exact address of the page with the illegal information. It may be formulated as “Material X authored by Y on www.sitename.org”. The verdict is then forwarded on to the Justice Ministry for placing on the federal register of extremist materials. The Ministry’s site contains this declaration:
“…the federal register of extremist materials is compiled on the basis of copies of court verdicts on information materials found to be extremist as submitted to the Justice Ministry of Russia. The title and other means of identifying information materials are entered in the federal register of extremist materials exactly as presented in the court’s written verdict.”
This means that instead of blocking an offending page, the Justice Ministry orders the whole site blocked, even though the source of the problem may be just a few lines of commentary tucked underneath an otherwise inoffensive story.
As a first step the Justice Ministry should send a demand to the hosting provider to remove the material in question from the site. Many Russian site owners prefer a quality hosting service from a European or American provider, so it’s not hard to see how this rule is applied. If the offending material is not removed, it is then placed on the federal register of extremist materials. This is the signal for Russian internet providers to block the site. However, access to the register is restricted, so not all providers are authorized to download the list of web addresses that should be blocked.
Naturally, all the major internet providers carry out the Ministry’s instructions to the letter. But there are some smaller providers decent enough to check whether the banned material is still up on the site, and who don’t block the site if the material has been taken down already. This is a pleasant, though unfortunately rare, exception to the rule.
What happens to the site itself? Depending on the provider, it either opens or it doesn’t. It has been known for a site to be available or blocked to members of the same family who are living in the same flat but use different providers for access (mobile and cable, for example).
As I noted earlier, by the time the owner of a blocked site finds out about it, it’s usually too late to appeal the decision. If a site owner doesn’t want to argue the merits of the banned material with the authorities, he can take it down and try to negotiate with the Justice Ministry. However, even if the Ministry agrees to take the ruling off the register, the court’s verdict naming the site still stands. The reputational damage is still there.
On February 1 a new law came into force, N 398-F3 of 28.12.2013 (http://www.rg.ru/2013/12/30/extrem-site-dok.html). This allows the Procurator General and his deputies to block a site in advance of court hearings. The site’s owner has 24 hours to take down the offending material. The domain is blocked immediately and access to it is only renewed when the regulatory agency has confirmed that the material has, indeed, been removed. The question of how the site’s administrator can remove the material within 24 hours when access to it is blocked clearly did not bother the authors of the law. Or maybe it did, a lot.
A concrete example is the experience of Adyge Heku, www.aheku.org. The site publishes news and information on the Circasasian community, as well as in-depth articles on Circassian history, linguistics, culture, literature, etc. The North Caucasus is a patchwork of nationalities. Interethnic relations are complex and contradictory, including intense rivalry and deep dislike of each other. This is all reflected in on-line discussions on a whole range of topics, and comments left underneath articles are often emotional and expressed in strong language. Comments are moderated and editors try to tone down the discussion and keep it within the limits of reasonable debate. Unfortunately, they’re not always able to catch breaches of ethical behavior in time.
In May 2013 a district court in Kabardino-Balkaria found a comment published under an article on www.aheku.org to be extremist. The comment was posted in 2009 by an anonymous author and was on the borderline of the permissible. It must have slipped past the moderator’s attention; otherwise they would have deleted it.
Events followed the procedure I just described. The court forwarded its verdict to the Justice Ministry without indicating the exact address of the offending page. The ruling referred in general terms to a comment under such-and-such an article published on Adyge Heku www.aheku.org. The Justice Ministry placed the site on the register of extremist materials and Russian providers began to block it. The wheels of Russian justice grind slowly and it wasn’t until mid-autumn 2013 that complaints began coming in from users, by which time the deadline for appeal had long since passed.
The offending commentary was removed and notification sent to the Ministry. They have not replied and the site remains on the register. It is still blocked.
The site’s owner did not receive a demand to remove the comment either before or after court proceedings.
All this procedure relates to information judged by regulatory and public order agencies to be extremist. The procedures for blocking sites containing other types of banned information differ depending on which body is initiating the block.
When we look at informal repressive measures taken against sites, the picture is much more obscure. It cannot be said unequivocally that the state or its affiliated structures organize DDoS attacks or break into sites. But we have serious grounds for believing that they do just that.
The massive DDoS attack on the site of the independent TV channel Rain (Dozhd) is one example. When did it happen? In the run-up to the State Duma elections. When did it happen again? During the opposition rallies on Bolotnaya Square, and again during the presidential elections, of course. The same happened to the Radio Ekho Moskvy site and other internet resources with a history of supporting the opposition. Can this be entirely coincidence?
Another “coincidence” happened at the start of the Sochi Winter Olympics. Several sites which had run critical stories on the games were attacked by hackers. This was not on the same scale as a DDoS, but no less effective. At least two sites (one Russian, one American – www.aheku.org and www.nosochi2014.com) using different hosting providers were broken into using the same technique. In both cases, articles posted on the sites were infected with the same script, which was identified by search engines as a virus. This meant the domains were blocked by Google Chrome, Firefox and antivirus programs. Of course, anybody who wanted to read the stories could try a different browser, switch on an antivirus and access them without trouble. Many people did that, but many didn’t.
The hackers picked a perfect time to attack. Visitor numbers were well up on the day of the games’ official opening, 2.5 times more than average, even on partially blocked www.aheku.org. So how many were unable to read our articles about the history of Sochi, the ancient capital of Circassia, destroyed in a brutal assault by the Russian army 150 years ago?
Adyge Heku recovered quickly from the attack, but the hackers were back on February 16, when they wrecked the archive. Presumably these efforts to blank out any alternative Circassian version of events in Sochi will continue until the games are over. Interestingly, in the 8 years of its existence the site was never once attacked until the Sochi games began.
The US-based site, www.nosochi2014, is still down.
We can only guess who is behind attacks like this. Though it seems unlikely to be the International Olympic Committee or the Czech national hockey team. It’s probably something we just have to live with, without worrying to much about exactly who is the organizer of these attacks. As they say, patience wins in the end, and the truth will always out.
The good news out of America is that the US is preparing to launch a satellite-based internet called Outernet, which will be available worldwide as early as next year, 2015. The precise technical details, such as how users on the ground will be able to access Outernet, are still hazy, but if it by-passes Russian providers, the Russian authorities will have to find new official means of blocking undesirable content. Not that we should be anxious on their behalf. They have huge experience in this and will find a way to criminalize the provision of content. But what seems most likely is that their preventive measures will move further into the realm of hacking and illegality.
