Flickr Creative Commons | Vladimir Frolov

By Leyla Boulton | Financial Times | June 16, 2011 |

When state television showed a dynamic Vladimir Putin at the wheel of a yellow Lada touring the provinces after devastating forest fires, a fuller picture was to be found on the internet.Video shot by laughing onlookers and uploaded to the net showed that the prime minister was in fact followed by a motorcade of at least two dozen vehicles, including three spare yellow Ladas in case of a mechanical breakdown.

There are few sectors that better reflect Russia’s lopsided development than the internet. The web has grown strongly as a business, drawing on the nation’s strengths in maths and science to produce a domestic search engine, Yandex, that describes itself as “better than Google”.

Yet the government’s efforts to foster a Russian Silicon Valley outside Moscow show how a poor investment climate is letting down that human potential. Politically, the return to an authoritarian system, in which the government controls television but not newspapers or radio, has turned the internet into a valuable – though incomplete – forum for free speech and discussion.

Like jokes in the Soviet era, the internet takes the sting out of Russian life in the 21st century.

Unfettered news and comment about everything that television will not touch includes descriptions of high-level shenanigans and mockery of the ruling tandem of Mr Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the president.

Mr Medvedev’s online nickname of “Captain Obvious” refers to his tendency to say the right thing with little to show for it. A few days after he declared that the release from prison of Mikhail Khodorkovsky would pose “absolutely no danger” to society, the former tycoon was sentenced to a second term in prison in what was widely seen as a politically motivated trial.

“You can go on the internet to vent your frustration and that makes you feel like you’ve done something, although of course you haven’t really changed anything,” says Sergey Alexashenko, a 21-year-old student at Georgetown University in the US. He is struck by the idealism of his US peers, compared with the cynicism back home.

Exceptions to such apathy include the Duma intern who was fired after he published details of expense-fiddling and time-wasting by parliamentarians on his blog.

Although internet penetration in Russia is expected to increase from 40 to 70 per cent over the next four years, according to Public Opinion Foundation, a Moscow-based polling agency, online debate is confined to a relatively small proportion of the population.

At one end of the range is the slick website of Snob magazine. Blogs by subscribers including oligarchs sit alongside interviews with the likes of Bill Browder, a foreign investor banned from Russia, whose lawyer died in custody while trying to protect his client’s assets from a scam involving officials.

At the other extreme, rightwing groups used the internet to organise demonstrations against immigration and corruption in December, and more chillingly, to target specific individuals. Oleg Kashin, a reporter, was savagely beaten in November (and filmed for all to see) after his picture appeared on a farright website labelled “to be punished”.

Given widespread apathy, Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, argues that an Arabstyle revolt driven by social media is not on the cards. “I see the mood but not the movement,” she says. “People are increasingly angry, but this does not change the overall assumption – that ‘there is nothing we can change’. ” The authorities, for their part, are taking no chances.

In an embarrassing episode before its IPO in New York last month, Yandex was forced by the FSB security agency to hand over details of contributors to an anti-corruption website run by Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and whistleblower. The details found their way to Nashi, a nationalist youth group prone to violent harassing of government critics.

And was the Kremlin involved in a cyber-attack on LiveJournal, a blogging site used by Mr Medvedev, Mr Navalny and the Duma intern? “Yes and no,” says Ilya Ponomarev, head of the Duma’s subcommittee for high-tech development, who advises the president on the internet.

He believes the attack was the “initiative of people sponsored by the administration to generate pro-government content in the blogosphere … but I don’t think they were directly ordered to [attack].

“As this community becomes larger, they invent activities for themselves to prove they are important. The same applies to our nationalist groups. It’s a Catch-22. The authorities give them money to gain leverage; they ask for more and go out of control.”

But in the absence of “open” politics, says Mr Ponomarev – speaking in a still largely empty mansion housing the president’s Institute for Contemporary Development – high-tech remains Russia’s most likely engine of progress.

Flickr Creative Commons | Howard Lifshitz

By Alexey Kovalev | The Guardian | September 24, 2010

Artyom Tiunov, a 25-year-old architect from Novosibirsk, was recently detained by Russian police on suspicion of theft and subjected to 14 hours of brutal interrogation. The police hoped he would confess to a crime he didn’t commit. They hoped he would provide them with an open-and-shut case; every police department has to present a certain number of these in a given a period or be subjected to severe questioning over their low clear-up rate. This pressure has become a major source of the abuse and corruption which everybody, including the police themselves, hopes to see off in the reforms scheduled for 2012-13..

But instead the police had to release Tiunov after being confronted with CCTV footage of him exiting a restaurant at the time of the alleged crime. Tiunov described the whole ordeal on his Livejournal.com page – a blogging platform massively popular in Russia ,hosting over 1.5 million Russian-language blogs – and the post, titled “Wrong place, wrong time”, attracted more than 1,000 comments in just two days. But instead of going to a protest rally against police brutality – not effective enough, he says – he continues to blog about his confrontation with the police over his unlawful detention and files complaints and requests for investigation.

The online outrage is gaining momentum and the whole case is now too public to be ignored by the authorities or mainstream media. Tiunov says he saw the chief of the police department that had detained him clutch a printed-out blogpost with all the outraged comments – which means that they are well aware of the public attention the case is receiving. However, he remains calmly realistic: “He didn’t seem scared or concerned. The chance that the online hype will make them more courteous towards detainees or at least more cautious is measly. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. And everybody should do the same, then it’ll start to change”.

Tiunov seems to be one of a new breed of Russian dissenter: a young, smart, iPhone-wielding professional, tech-savvy enough to understand the power of the internet and to use it to his advantage. He may not have any political persuasion at all, but when he runs into trouble with the state’s institutions, he won’t be attending a political demonstration and risk being batoned or arrested. He knows exactly how to generate enough hype to make his case public, and the online environment seems to be quite encouraging of his actions. Many have noted the curious absence of censorship on the Russian-speaking internet which largely remains a free-for-all zone, quite unlike traditional media which are kept on a tight leash, as demonstrated by the recent simultaneous smear campaigns against Moscow’s rebellious mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and neighbouring post-Soviet countries where bloggers are intimidated and opposition websites shut down on a regular basis.

For example, the owner of @KermlinRussia, a spoof of Dmitry Medvedev’s official Twitter account spewing out sarcastic parodies of the president’s every tweet, says he hasn’t been contacted by anyone from the real Kremlin with any cease-and-desist demands, which suggests that Medvedev himself might actually enjoy a bit of good internet comedy (although his own tweets are snore-inducingly tedious). Or it’s a case of “won’t dignify with a response” – we can’t know for sure. In any case, jokes, cartoons and Photoshopped images of both Medvedev and Putin – often quite venomous – abound in Runet, and none of their authors have been under any pressure to take them down.

Yes, some are being prosecuted for bitter online remarks and servers confiscated, and some pro-Kremlin politicians call for censorship crudely disguised as “security measures“, but apart from several isolated and widely publicised cases Runet seems to remain virtually free from state control. Google Transparency Report doesn’t list a single data or removal request from Russia – unlike, for example, a staggering 4,287 from the USA. 

Instead, Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia), the ruling party, employs a different strategy. Recently, it proudly announced the start of Project Blogosphere aimed at “political domination through direct communication with voters in social networks and online debates”, or, in normal-speak, pro-active propaganda rather than suppression. That, however, is proving to be a risky strategy: older politicians, encouraged to start their own blog, rely on their assistants to generate Soviet-style triumphalist reports with little to no actual feedback, while younger, more active members of Edinaya Rossiya have caused some major PR blunders for the party, much to the amusement of the online population.

For example, during the recent wildfire crisis, Ruslan Gattarov and Vladimir Burmatov, two senior members of ER’s youth wing (Molodaya Gvardiya, The Young Guard of United Russia), tried to use the disaster for their own political gain. They assembled a volunteer firefighting team, dressed them in party colours and went on to extinguish a fire in a forest several hundred kilometres from Moscow, all the while tweeting and posing for photographs with flags and party logos in the foreground.

What they didn’t realise was that their every move, tweet and photo was being meticulously analysed by the very people they hoped to impress and “dominate” – the bloggers. Soon a detailed blogpost appeared dismissing Gattarov and Burmatov’s proud reports as fake: their clothes looked far too clean for a messy operation like forest firefighting, and the area in question wasn’t even on fire. As it turned out, they simply set a bush on fire and photographed themselves putting it out to boast the party’s active involvement in the firefighting operation. Outrage ensued, much to the embarrassment of both the Young Guard and the party.

These are just a few examples of how the internet promotes transparency in Russia and accountability of those in power. We can’t know for sure whether it’s due to the government’s inherited inertia and reliance on old-fashioned top-down management, or whether this lax attitude towards online content is a genuine sign of democratisation. But please blog on.

Flickr Creative Commons | Howard Lifshitz

AFP | September 15, 2010

MOSCOW — Microsoft on Wednesday said it would supply free software to Russian nongovernmental organisations after a media report that the US software giant was aiding Russian police in stifling dissent.

The New York Times said earlier this month that Russian authorities had used a crackdown on pirated Microsoft software as a pretext to confiscate computers and harass non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Lawyers retained by Microsoft backed police during their raids on several occasions, it said.

After the report the company condemned the Russian authorities’ practice of using anti-piracy laws to put pressure on NGOs and said it would ensure that Russian NGOs have free software.

“We are preparing a programme of free software for NGOs and for some media,” a spokeswoman for Microsoft’s Moscow office, Irina Meshkova, told AFP.

“We will announce the list and the selection criteria later, as well as the timescale for this decision to come into force,” she added.

In January, police raided the office of Russian NGO Baikal Environmental Wave, saying that they were searching for pirated Microsoft software, the New York Times reported.

Police confiscated computers in the operation against the campaign group, which opposes the government-authorised reopening of a paper factory on the banks of pristine Lake Baikal in Siberia

On Monday, Microsoft senior vice president Brad Smith said in a blog post that the company would draw up a new software licence for NGOs that would provide them with free, legal software.

“We’re creating in Russia a new NGO Legal Assistance Program focused specifically on helping NGOs document to the authorities that this new software license proves that they have legal software,” he said.

Microsoft estimated last year that it loses around one billion dollars per year from piracy in Russia.

Flickr Creative Commons | Josh Berglund

By A.S. | The Economist | August 25, 2010 

A.S. appears courtesy of Global Voices Online, an international community of bloggers

THIS summer Russians faced several state attempts to “filter” (selectively block) websites. And as in many other things, Russia has gone its own way with a slightly more complicated technique: regional filtering.

There are two ways to control the internet. You can influence the companies and bloggers who use the web, or you can muck with the architecture of the web itself to block or monitor traffic. China does both. Russia, so far, has leaned on websites and telecoms operators using its criminal code, and encouraged groups of like-minded citizens to nudge the online conversation in directions the Kremlin finds pleasing. Until now, few websites have been blocked altogether in Russia.

But this year three such cases were identified. In each, the site was blocked only within a certain region. On July 16th, the city court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur obliged Rosnet, a local internet provider, to ban YouTube and the Internet Archive, among other sites. The court was worried about far-right extremist material that can be found on the sites; it is the country’s first YouTube ban. The decision has not been enforced. For similar reasons in late July, a regional court in Ingushetia forced a local provider to block LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging site. And in August in the Tula region, the state-controlled local telecoms operator temporarily blocked the website of Tulksiye Priyanki, an independent regional news portal.

In each case, the region used internet-protocol or “IP” blocking, a straightforward way of preventing anyone within a certain network — in this case those of the regional providers — from viewing content at specific address. This could be described as an inefficient method, since it can be sidestepped with a proxy server, which mimics a location outside of the network.

But regional filtering is in many ways more efficient than national filtering. First of all, it attracts less media attention and is easier to hide. Even if the filtering is exposed it’s easy to say the site was inaccessible due to technical reasons. Second, regional blocking affects the target group only.

In Ingushetia and Khabarovsk the prosecutor’s office requested the filter. In Khabarovsk, the provider exposed the court’s decision and appealed it. It is likely that the higher court will overrule the lower court’s decision. In Ingushetia, the block on LiveJournal lasted for 17 days; it was removed as soon as several influential online media outlets wrote about it. In Tula it was allegedly the governor of the region, irritated by the website’s criticism, who ordered the block; Tulksiye Prinanki had already mirrored its site at blogger.com.

This news is both discouraging and encouraging. It proves that there’s room for internet censorship wherever a political power is aligned with a network. At a national level, Russia prefers internet monitoring to internet filtering; at a local level, Russia’s regions may begin to better understand how to manipulate their own networks. But all three attempts were technically crude and quickly detected, and none survived much contact with sunlight. That’s something to be thankful for.

Flickr Creative Commons | Howard Lifshitz

Reporters Sans Frontieres | July 30, 2010

Reporters Without Borders condemns the draconian and disproportionate ruling issued by judge Anna Eisenberg in the Russian far-east city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur on 16 July ordering local Internet Service Provider RA-RTS Rosnet to block access to video-sharing website YouTube and four other websites from 3 August onwards.

YouTube is to be blocked because of a nationalist video called “Russia for the Russians,” which is on a list of extremist content banned by the justice ministry. The other four sites – three online libraries (Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru) and Web.archives.org, which keeps copies of old or suppressed web pages – are to be blocked for having copies of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

“This unilateral decision, blocking entire websites instead of targeting the offending web pages, violates freedom of information and could affect all of Russia’s Internet users,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Russia’s laws on extremism are much criticised because they are used arbitrarily and because they can have such dire consequences as the blocking of independent websites.”

The press freedom organisation added: “There are other mechanisms, envisaged in YouTube’s user conditions, for obtaining the withdrawal of videos that pose a problem. Why did the prosecutor take this case directly to court? Why didn’t he just contact YouTube’s moderators or those in charge of the online libraries to request withdrawal of the offending content?”

The head of the Russian ISP, Alexandre Ermakov, said he would appeal against the ruling and would not execute it because, in his view, he did not have the right to restrict access to information in the absence of any violation of the user conditions of the service offered. He added that he proposed several ways for filtering out access to the offending content, without blocking the entire domain name, but the court ignored him.

Describing the ruling as “contrary to the constitution,” Google said the content of the “Russia for the Russians” video could have been reported to the YouTube moderator as a violation of the user conditions.

Reporters Without Borders added Russia to its “Countries under surveillance” list in the March 2010 update of its “Enemies of the Internet” report (http://en.rsf.org/surveillance-russia,36671.html). The Internet became Russia’s freest medium for sharing information after the Kremlin brought the broadcast media under control at the start of the Putin era.

But the Internet’s independence is being threatened by arrests and prosecutions of bloggers and by the blocking of independent websites on the grounds of “extremist” content. The authorities are also themselves now using the Internet extensively for propaganda purposes.

YouTube has a lot of content, including the Russian president’s TV station.

Flickr Creative Commons | Mixy Lorenzo

By Alexey Sidorenko | Global Voices | July 8, 2010

A decision [EN] by the Supreme Court of Russia on June 15 to “exempt” online news media outlets of responsibility for user comments has in fact turned out to be the introduction of a full-scale censorship procedure. Roskomnadzor, a federal service that supervises Internet and mass media communication for the Russian Ministry of Telecommunications, has introduced a new “one day rule” that says online media must delete or edit “inappropriate” comments on their websites within one day of being notified or risk losing their mass media registrations.

Forbidden topics are listed in Article 4 of the law “On Mass Media” [RUS]. These include incitement to hatred, terrorism, and violence, links to pornography, and disclosure of state secrets.

Roskomnadzor issued its first legal warning to a website Apn.ru by e-mail on June 23, but at that point it was not clear how quickly the comment should be deleted, or whether an official demand could be sent by e-mail. On July 6, Roskomnadzor published [RUS] a document describing the guidelines for notification with the lengthy title: “Procedure for Issuing Appeals to News Media Outlets that Circulate in Telecommunication Networks and on the Internet on Inadmissibility of the Abuse of Freedom of Mass Information” (full text [RUS])

The procedure is as follows.

• A Roskomandzor employee makes a screen shot image of the inappropriate comment, saves it on a hard drive, and prints it.
• Then an official “responsible for government control and law enforcement online”, approves the evidence of “abuse of the freedom of mass information” (the document clearly says “approve” not “judge” or “decide”).
• After this, the department sends an e-mail and a fax to the website owner with an order to delete or edit the questionable comment.
• If the media outlet does not follow the order within 24 hours, it will receive a legal notice. Several notices will lead to a lawsuit against the media outlet. If Roskomnadzor wins the lawsuit, the website loses its mass media registration.

Neither the law “On Mass Media“ nor Roskomandzor explain if the website would be shut down after losing its registration, but for most commercial media outlets it would mean an inability to function legally (get paid for ads, pay wages to its employees, etc).

Sergey Sitnikov, head of Roskomnadzor, explained [RUS] the goal of his department was to “prevent further dissemination of unlawful information,” but many Russian bloggers were disturbed by the idea, and heatedly discussed the matter on Habrahabr [RUS], an IT-related portal.

Some bloggers tried to look on the bright side (unsuccessfully). StrangeAttractor wrote [RUS]:

Если закон запрещает призывать через интернет к актам террора и хулиганства, то это нормально и хорошо. Но если запрещает высказывать своё мнение о чём либо … или гордиться своим национальным наследием …, то это чистой воды маразм и провокация

If the law forbids to incite to terrorism or hooliganism, it’s OK and it’s good. But if it forbids you to express your own opinion about something… or to be proud of your national heritage…, then it’s clear idiocy and a provocation

Newpravda wrote [RUS]:

С одной стороны мысль конечно хорошая, поясню – не давать права людям которые занимаются террором права слова, но зная нашу действительность под эту статью будут подводить всё что угодно, не удивлюсь что и крокодила Гену с Чебурашкой запретят за пропаганду чего нибудь.

On the one hand, it’s a good idea, let me explain – not to give the right to terrorists to speak freely. But knowing our reality, they [Roskomnadzor] will apply the ['one day rule'] to anything they want, I wouldn’t be surprised if they forbid Gena and Cheburashka [EN] [heroes of a popular cartoon] for propaganda of something.

Various effects and implications of the law have also been discussed Vitaliidaniuk expressed [RUS] skepticism about the efficiency of the document, arguing that it would be very hard to control Twitter comments often posted next to the articles or in integrated commenting systems (like Disqus or IntenseDebate).

Voldar suggested [RUS] that the awaited National Search Engine [EN] might be used to look for inappropriate comments and automatically send notices to the authors. XaosSintez wrote [RUS] about the huge potential for fake Roskomnadzor notices to block any kind of discussion. And xoco shared [RUS] his story of how authorities already monitor and control online and offline expression:

Печально все это. Как причастный к созданию одного из сайтов о городе Люберцы хочу поделиться своей историей. На форуме этого сайта ведется обсуждения о плохих дорогах, новостройках, чиркизонах. Так вот, там на форуме люди собрались выйти на улицу с демонстрацией на тему — почему ямы на дорогах полметра глубиной, ну и _поразмышляли_ о том что куда это годится и не перекрыть ли дорогу демонстрацией. В тот же день мы получили сообщение от «органов» из которого следовало, что мы должны предоставить всю информацию о пользователях активистах — ip, время захода и т.п. Якобы эти люди занимаются экстремистской деятельностью. Что будет дальше? Свободой слова тут и не пахло.

It is all very sad. Being connected to the creation of one of the community website of the city of Lyubertsy [EN] (Moscow satellite), I’d like to share my story. On the forum we discus bad roads, new buildings, chaotic markets. So, forum users were thinking of going to the streets to attract attention to the roads with holes that are a half meter deep, and were discussing if they should block city streets with a demonstration. The same day we received a message from the authorities that demanded information about the forum activists – IP-addresses, time of forum access, etc. As if these people were involved in extremist activities. What will happen next? There isn’t a trace of freedom of speech.

As a result of the discussion, bloggers established a hashtag on Twitter #ru_cenz in order to track all the incidents related to the new measures of content removal and RuNet censorship in general.

The latest practices introduced by Roskomnadzor not only violate the text of the Russian Constitution, that forbid any kind of censorship, but also appear to contradict president Medvedev’s point of view on the matter [RUS]. The case illustrates several features of the current political regime: lack of respect for laws and human rights, contradiction between words and deeds, and finally, a clear will to affect and control RuNet.

Herdict gathers user-generated reports about Web site accessibility from around the world to draw a real-time image of which websites are inaccessible, in which countries and for how long. Users can participate in the initiative by either going directly to the site www.herdict.org or by downloading a browser add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Herdict Web launched in February 2009 to great accolades and has since received visitors from over 150 countries and over 100,000 reports.

Arabic and Chinese versions of the site are also available.

Flickr Creative Commons | Yeowatzup

New fears of Internet censorship spread in the Russian blogosphere Monday after a wireless Internet provider co-owned by Russian Technologies acknowledged blocking access to some web sites.

Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.

Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.

Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.

“In November, we got an order from prosecutors recommending that we close access to extremist sites,” he said in e-mailed comments. “Since we are a law-abiding firm, we put the order into practice.”

As for users’ lack of access to the opposition web sites, Sverdlov blamed technical difficulties that arose after Yota introduced new IP addresses to cope with the rapid growth of its customer base. “On Oct. 23, we were assigned a bloc of 65,536 IP addresses. After we put them to commercial use, we found that IT managers of some other sites could not exclude them from those IP addresses they filter,” Sverdlov said.

As proof that there was no censorship, he said President Dmitry Medvedev’s official site at Kremlin.ru was at times inaccessible as well.

Kavkaz Center was declared extremist in a 2008 court decision and appears 10 times on the Justice Ministry’s list of more than 450 items classified as extremist. The ministry’s list does not mention any of the opposition sites that have complained of being inaccessible to Yota users.

Critics say the extremism law, which was widened in 2006, is being used to silence the opposition.

It is unclear why, with the exception of Yota, most national providers do not block access to Kavkaz Center.

A representative at Yota’s technical support hot line told the Novy Region news agency on Friday that the company was blocking 29 extremist sites. The unidentified representative said Kasparov.ru was not on the list but the list had been updated a week earlier.

Bloggers, meanwhile, are rattled by an audio file posted online Sunday in which a female voice — purportedly of a Yota support representative — says Kasparov’s and Solidarity’s sites are blocked because they are on that list.

“This strongly smells of political censorship,” said Denis Bilunov, a senior member of Kasparov’s Other Russia movement.

He said the most likely explanation was Russian Technologies’ involvement in the company.

The state-owned arms and industry behemoth bought a blocking stake in Telconet in November 2008.

A spokeswoman said Russian Technologies could not immediately comment on the allegations Monday.

Skartel spokesman Anton Belkov said he would not comment beyond Sverdlov’s statement.

Skartel has been building a network providing high-speed wireless Internet service since last summer and has said it wants to become a nationwide operator covering 180 cities within three years. State corporation Russian Technologies holds a 25.1 percent blocking stake in Skartel’s parent company, Telconet.

The Internet has been called the country’s last bastion of free speech after the state brought most national television channels and influential print media under its control over the past decade. Fears of a crackdown were raised last month after a video address by police officer Alexei Dymovsky lambasting corruption unleashed a string of copycat whistle-blowers airing their complaints online. Also last month, top search engine Yandex stopped ranking popular blog posts after several entries exposed problems that embarrassed government officials.