Runet was sifted through a filter
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The register of blocked sites last week was replenished as actively as it has not been observed since the mass blockings in 2018 and 2021. According to Roskomsvoboda, almost 15,000 entries have been entered into the register. A significant proportion of out-of-court blocking requests come from an agency whose name has not been disclosed. Human rights activists suggest that we are talking about the Prosecutor General’s Office. The experts add that ahead of the reporting period at the end of the year, the authorities could also synchronize the registry of banned sites with the list of blocking carried out on communication networks through technical threat countermeasures.
From December 5 to December 11, access to 14.8 thousand Internet resources was closed in Russia, according to data from the registry of blocked sites collected for Kommersant by the human rights organization Roskomsvoboda. They say that during 2022, 1.5-7 thousand resources were blocked per week, an average of 4.9 thousand.
The last time such an increase in the number of blocks was observed in April 2021 against the backdrop of protests in support of politician Alexei Navalny: then, in the week from April 19, 2021, 18.1 thousand sites and pages were blocked. The previous peak occurred after the already canceled decision to block Telegram in Russia: between April 23 and 30, 2018, 13.4 thousand resources were blocked.
Last week, 2.1 thousand resources (14% of the total) were blocked by decisions of some unnamed agency. “Presumably, this is the Prosecutor General’s Office, because it was she who “suddenly” disappeared from our downloads,” Natalya Malysheva, press secretary of Roskomsvoboda, told Kommersant.
References to the Prosecutor General’s Office and the details of its decisions on blocking were no longer displayed in the monitoring system of Roskomsvoboda in November. Already in December, Roskomnadzor submitted to regulation.gov.ru draft order, according to which it will be possible not to disclose information about the decisions of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Roskomnadzor did not respond to Kommersant’s request.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has the authority to block a variety of information, from information about the military operation in Ukraine, declared unreliable in Russia, to offers to sell fake diplomas. Roskomsvoboda does not observe an anomalous predominance of one category over another in the structure of blocking, Ms. Malysheva said. The Federal Tax Service, responsible for the majority of extrajudicial blocking in 2022 (31%), was involved in 12% of access restrictions last week. Judicial blocks since December 5 made up 60% of the total, during the year they occupied 35%.
The current surge of locks differs from the previous ones in that there has been a serious overall increase in the registry. Previous peaks were accompanied by equally massive exceptions. So, from April 19 to April 26, 2021, according to Roskomsvoboda, 14.9 thousand resources were unlocked, and from April 23 to April 30, 2018 – 26 thousand. However, last week only 326 entries were excluded from the register.
The fact that recently the availability of sites in the Russian Federation has not significantly deteriorated may indicate the synchronization of the registry of blocked sites with the lists for filtering sent to TSPU (technical means of countering threats, equipment installed on the networks of telecom operators under the law “on sovereign Runet”) , says Karen Ghazaryan, director general of the Internet Research Institute. The reason for this, in his opinion, may be purely formal – “the end of the year is approaching, it is time for reports.” Mr. Ghazaryan noted that access to sites is often blocked, to which no one would pay attention without the fact of blocking – “the logic of blocking does not always correspond to the proportionality of threats.”
Authorities that make decisions about blocking sites have long been switching to a “stick system”, that is, they are trying to increase indicators, and now there is a move away from the openness of information about blocking, believes IT specialist Philip Kulin. “The authorities are trying step by step to remove all the levers of public control and ways to ensure accountability,” he says.
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