The web is not any longer free in Russia — that is according to a report recently released by Freedom House, Freedom Net. The threats have raised since 2014, although liberty of expression online has been under threat for a while in the Russian Federation.

‘Since 2012, a register of restricted sites has managed. This is not the national list of extremist contents, where there is a stack of video clips and leaflets, which the court has attempted to distort in its categorization. The FSB does not track how prohibitions are set in place: they are more interested in making sure Roskomnadzor’s [the national body responsible for media supervision] recommendations come through on time.

Although we are a typical example of a small business, with 10,000 domain names. even we’ve one A FSB man just sits with a listing of suppliers to track. He’s got the numbers on downloads and then you certainly get a call when you are high –your curator begins threatening and reprimanding you. I understand some folks who were fined because their admins quit looking at the upgrades for the black lists.

Unlike the FSB, the prosecutor’s office checks to find out if sites that are prevented may nevertheless be obtained. As stated by the prosecutor’s sense, every supplier who isn’t conscious that some website has been prohibited should be taken to court. We were fined 50,000 roubles [GBP500]. In 2011, it appears, we did not block a website that is particular, and now they have realised. We want more instances for the quarterly report.’

Of executing black lists the system varies widely — from the wholesale blocking of a complete web site, which is to blocking special links, which is what we do what the large operators do. Obviously, this is more higher priced and challenging technically. Usually, in the event you make use of a little operator, you are prone to see content that is restricted — there is less strict execution at this amount.

There was a little panic over separatism last summer. Because of this, on federalising Siberia all the stuff were blocked. They used semantic investigations, i.e. hunting for particular mark in texts. Positions like Yandex [Russia’s most famous search engine] are prohibiting results for searches like ‘Putin-terrorism-Caucasus, but the ISPs haven’t been reached by this .

We just block a website when a prosecutor’s order that refers to a court judgement is received by us. But in the areas, state organs need to meet the standard. Roskomnadzor isn’t contacted by them, they do not request to contain the website that is restricted in the register — they go directly to court.

Obviously, when a court order is received by us, we block everything — it is simply we could not have found out about the conclusion before, given that you can learn about the conclusion of the Khanty Mansiisk court simply on its web site. I reply: ‘Yes, obviously!’ Afterward we go to assess: the website, naturally, opens readily enough — after all, the court is not connected to our network, and their supplier is not any more conscious of the Khanty Mansiisk court’s conclusion. I make an effort to clarify that the website can’t be blocked by our business everywhere, just on the land of our neighbourhood. They appear to comprehend, and then they send me the court summons anyhow — block this site everywhere and now.

The blacklists include opposition sites (Grani, Kasparov.ru), spiritual sites also. A lot of the time, it is all sorts of waste websites which are becoming blocked — nothing interesting or especially shocking. Frequently it is unreadable far left websites with addresses that are long. They recently blocked an on-line database of passport info — you could not find anything there.