Internet Enemies 2011: Countries under surveillance - Russia

Domain name: .ru
Population: 141,927,297
Internet users: 59,700,000
Average monthly salary: about 740 U.S. dollars
Number of imprisoned netizens: 0

2010 was the year when the Internet galvanised Russian society, exerting its influence on the country's politics and current events despite government efforts to make the Russian Web suit its own purposes. Enhanced collaboration between bloggers, online media and certain traditional media outlets may have a positive impact on the right to information, bucking the trend towards a large-scale erosion of freedoms in Russia.

Is Russia becoming more "connected"?

According to a study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, most Internet users in Russia are members of an urban and educated population found to be very active online, particularly via social networks and blogs. The still somewhat low penetration rate, estimated at about 37% of the total population, reveals obvious gaps between the cities – which offer abundant opportunities for Internet access – and the country. Authorities have promised new initiatives to bridge the digital divide.

Political leaders, foremost among them President Medvedev, are expanding their presence on the Web. Russia's President, who is already well-known as a blogger, began tweeting in June 2010.

According to RuMetrica, the RuNet space – including Russian-speaking countries and the diaspora – now reaches a total audience of 38 million people, or 40% more than it did last year.

The blogosphere's contribution to the right to information

Last year also brought the recognition of bloggers as active actors in the dissemination of information.

Russian blogs are said to number 30 million. The Public.ru media observatory claims that the traditional media cited information originating from the blogosphere 6,000 times in 2010: 30 times more than it did five years ago.

Among the key issues which bloggers have tackled – successfully compensating for the absence of coverage by the traditional media – is the fight to preserve the Khimki Forest, on the outskirts of Moscow. Several journalists and bloggers were assaulted and arrested for having presented a version of the facts different from the official one.

The Help Map project, which relies on the Ushahidi collaborative platform, has enabled Russian netizens to warn firefighters about the spread of forest fires and to grant or offer help to those most affected by this disaster. To date, the website has had more than 200,000 visitors.

Regional filtering attempts

Russia is not enforcing a website filtering policy like that of China, for example, but its leaders are using more subtle control methods designed not to prevent the transmission of information but to shape it, often by resorting to genuine propaganda and by placing pressure on Internet access providers.

Regional-level attempts to filter the Internet were observed in 2010, when local access providers tried to block certain IP addresses – initiatives less likely to raise a public outcry and which directly affect the target population. While such attempts failed, they may be the first signs of delocalised censorship.

On 16 July, 2010, Judge Anna Eisenberg, presiding over the court of Komsomolsk-on-Amur (Russian Far East), ordered the local access provider RA RTS Rosnet to block access, as of 3 August 2010, to three online libraries: Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru, as well as to YouTube and to Web.archives.org. The latter website keeps copies of old or removed Web pages. YouTube was accused of hosting a nationalist video entitled "Russia for the Russians," which is on the list of extremist content banned by the Russian Ministry of Justice. The four other websites were allegedly hosting copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf. The blocking of YouTube – a first in Russia – was ultimately not enforced.

A similar case occurred in the Republic of Ingushetia in July 2010. A regional court forced a local access provider to block LiveJournal. In August, the Tula region's local telecom operator temporarily blocked access to the independent Internet news website Tulksiye Priyanki.

The list of "extremist" content held by the Ministry of Justice includes close to 500 terms and is constantly growing under the watchful eye of the "E departments" responsible for quashing extremist activities. Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code defines extremism as "xenophobia" and "incitement of enmity" by relying on a social group, among others. This was the reason invoked by the authorities in closing down the website ingushetiya.ru, the only news portal in the Ingush language reporting on acts of violence in Ingushetia.

The opposition website, 20marta.ru, which focused on the "Day of Wrath" protests, was also shut down for inciting anti-government sentiment.

More subtle forms of control: Subcontracted surveillance and content removal

The Internet in Russia is regulated by the Federal Service for Monitoring Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, whose director is appointed by the Prime Minister. With the installation of such software as SORM-2, the government has acquired the necessary tools to carry out, if it so wishes, a form of Internet surveillance. Yet it does not intend to initiate a global surveillance of RuNet. Its "K department" is focusing its surveillance efforts on a few known dissidents and bloggers who are already being watched offline.

Controlling RuNet begins with a notification to remove the content. In order to tighten their grip on cyberspace, Russian authorities increasingly depend upon Internet access providers and the various blog and social network platforms, thus to some extent privatising their surveillance and control. This is all the easier to implement in that popular social networks such as Vkontakte and the LiveJournal blogs platform were bought out by oligarchs with close ties to the Russian leadership.

Following the December 2010 nationalist riots in Moscow triggered by the death of a soccer fan, the Vkontakte.ru social network instructed its 600 moderators to monitor news circulating online and to remove all content likely to "incite hatred." The most popular blog platform, LiveJournal, responded to users' denunciations of abuse, then introduced stricter rules providing for the automatic suspension of blogs discussing the difficult situation of minorities. The blogs of at least three popular political bloggers: pilgrim 67, rakhat aliev and sadalskij were removed.

Internet specialist Evgeny Morozov revealed that the Kremlin asked Yuri Milner, Silicon Valley-based CEO of Digital Sky Technologies and an investor in Russian social networks and in Facebook, to bring together Internet access providers with a view to harmonising their position on ways to manage "illegal" material on the Internet.

In addition, a decision rendered on 15 June 2010 by Russia's Supreme Court made it mandatory for online media to eliminate or edit on their websites comments deemed "inappropriate" within 24 hours of notification, under penalty of losing their media accreditation. Outlawed subjects include inciting hatred, terrorism, pornography, and divulging state secrets. An initial e-mail warning was sent to the Agency for Political News (APN) for posting comments allegedly calling for violence against certain judges.

This new regulation induced these sites' webmasters to come up with creative solutions. They removed spaces reserved for posting comments underneath accompanying articles and replaced them with links to forums hosted on other websites which they control. Netizens can continue to express themselves freely on these other forums.

Propaganda and manipulation: A national RuNet alternative?

After being blacklisted by their peers, the pro-Kremlin blogger group apparently has been losing some of its influence.

Some bloggers also revealed that certain unscrupulous netizens were accepting money to post comments or information promoting a particular cause. Some Kremlin bloggers were caught in the act of trying to corrupt their peers in order to convince them to post links to their websites. Police officers were also caught trying to launch a pro-police campaign. Netizens have been mobilising more and more frequently to resist such manipulation attempts and to achieve Internet transparency.

Cyber attacks have continued, yet it is still difficult to trace them back to the perpetrators. The website of the independent daily Novaya Gazeta was paralysed for a week in late January 2010 after several denial-of-service (DdoS) attacks.

According to the RBC Daily, authorities are in the process of setting up a national search engine which would exclude certain research topics such as pornography or extremism, and whose task would be to focus on government information. A 110 million-dollar budget is thought to have been earmarked for this project – information denied by the Russian Ministry of Telecommunications. The government already owns a share in Yandex, the country's most popular search engine.

Bloggers under pressure?

No Russian blogger has been imprisoned these past months.

However, Vladimir Li'yurov, commenter on the online media forum Komi Republic, was given a six-month suspended prison sentence for making anti-Semitic statements – accusations which he denied.

Alexander Sorokin has been the subject of criminal proceedings since August 2010 on charges of f libel against Kemerovo governor Arnan Tuleev. On his blog, Sorokin had compared Russian regional governors to Latin American dictators.

Alexeï Navalny, a young lawyer who has been denoncing on his blog officials' corruption for years, has just created a website Rospil that has been labeled the "Russian WikiLeaks". He exposed a state company's illegal activities while building a pipeline in Siberia. He is now sued by the authorities for financial embezzlements.

More importantly, the well-known blogger Oleg Kachine, read by thousands of Internet users every day, and a journalist with the daily Kommersant, was brutally attacked near his home in Moscow in the night of Friday to Saturday, 5 and 6 November 2010. He had devoted many blogs to opposition movements such as Oborona and NBP and the pro-Kremlin youth movements. He had recently covered the dispute over the Khimki Forest and the iron deadlock between the officials supporting the freeway construction project and the environmentalists opposing it.

The attack on Kachine had an enormous psychological effect on Russian bloggers and sent an unmistakeable message to the blogosphere: everyone shall be held responsible for what he or she writes and may get into serious trouble for it: a sure way of inducing people to practice self-censorship.

This situation is all the more certain since impunity still prevails. Magomed Yevloyev, one of the developers, and the owner, of the Ingush news website ingushetiyaru.org, was killed in August 2008 while being held by agents of the autonomous republic's Ministry of the Interior: a crime which so far has gone unpunished.

Online activism: A mirage or a true success?

The Internet is also used in Russia as an online mobilisation tool. While anyone can speak out against the abuses perpetrated by those in power, that does not necessarily mean justice will be served. For example, Anatoly Barkov, Vice-President of the Lukoil company, caused a car accident which killed two people. He managed to circumvent the wheels of justice, despite information provided by bloggers and a massive protest on the Web.

However, Global Voices highlighted a few examples of successful online mobilisations:

• The murder of a young woman, Anna Buzilo, was solved thanks to the collaboration of netizens on the drom.ru forum and her murderer was arrested.

• The "Live Barrier" case: a police officer was given a one-year prison term in November 2010 for having stopped some vehicles and forced them to form a barricade during a car chase in pursuit of an alleged criminal.

Denouncing corruption remains one of the bloggers' favourite pastimes. They have drawn citizens' attention to government IT project tenders which have attained astronomical amounts. Some of them were cancelled as a result, thereby avoiding illegal dealings and the waste of public funds, in sums estimated at over one million dollars.

Local elections have shown the capacity of bloggers to denounce instances of fraud and to document them. The Russian blogosphere and online media will probably be tested during the upcoming 2012 presidential elections, despite President Medvedev's statement in May 2010 that Russia is entering an era that will mark a return "from representative democracy to direct democracy to a certain extent with the help of the Internet."