Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

As it happened, Navalny was wearing a microphone and being shadowed by a camera crew for a possible television documentary. When he was detained, the microphone was transmitting and caught his words with the police. The conversation was tense. The policemen twisted his arms behind his back and raised them high and hard to make him bend over, the way dangerous criminals are transported within Russian prisons. Navalny told them it was extremely painful and in a quiet voice said, “You are breaking my arm!” The policeman agreed that he was indeed going to break Navalny’s arm, and Navalny said, through clenched teeth, “I’ll send you to jail then.” Navalny was then forced into a paddy wagon.

The whole thing was transmitted from the microphone he was wearing and soon posted on YouTube, which inflamed the public.

The Kremlin responded forcefully to the protest. Twenty-seven people were arrested and accused, more than two hundred investigators were deployed. The police searched the protest leaders’ apartments—Navalny, Udaltsov, Kseniya Sobchak, Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Yashin, and Pyotr Verzilov.

Putin was inaugurated as planned on May 7 in a grand ceremony at the Kremlin. For the protesters, the clashes the day before proved a disaster. Mutual accusations and arguing followed. The Kremlin blamed the opposition for inciting violence on Moscow’s streets. The protesters did try other options: the famous Russian writers—among them Akunin, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Dmitry Bykov, and Lev Rubinstein—invited Muscovites to “a walk with writers” on Moscow’s boulevards, and thousands joined them, protesting how the Kremlin had responded on May 6. Navalny launched the Russian version of the Occupy movement idea—he took his supporters to Chistie Prudi, and they occupied space near a monument to the Kazakh poet Abay. They lasted only five days: on May 15 police pushed out dozens of the most committed activists. By then the protests gathered no more than a few thousand supporters.

Amonth after Putin took office for a third term, the Kremlin finally found a way to crack down on social media. On June 7, 2012, four members of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, introduced legislation to begin a nationwide system of filtering on the Internet. The pretext was to protect children. It included a single register of banned sites, which was really, in simple terms, a blacklist.

The principle of Internet censorship was hardly a new one for the Russian authorities. For five years regional prosecutors had been busy implementing regional court decisions requiring providers to block access to banned sites. But this had not been done in a systematic, nationwide way. Websites blocked in one region remained accessible in others. The arrival of a single register made it possible to close down sites across all of Russia, all at once. [17] The new system of filtering was modeled on the one used to block extremist and terrorist bank accounts in Russia. Three government agencies—Roskomnadzor (the Agency for the Supervision of Information Technology, Communications and Mass Media), the Federal Anti-Drug Agency, and the Federal Service for the Supervision of Consumer Rights and Public Welfare—submit data for the government’s blacklist of sites. Roskomnadzor is in charge of compiling and updating the register and is also responsible for instructing host providers to remove the URLs. If no action by the host provider follows, the ISPs are required to block access to the site within twenty-four hours. The host providers must also ensure they are not in breach of current law by checking their content against the database of outlawed sites and URLs published in a special password-protected online version of the register open only to web hosters and ISPs. Since November 2012 thousands of websites have been banned from the Russian Internet; the Internet monitoring law has had some substantial offline consequences as well. Institutions providing public access to the Internet—schools, libraries, Internet cafés, and even post offices—have been targeted for law enforcement inspections to check for computers containing software that might allow access to banned websites.

Irina Levova worked as an expert for the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, the only organization the Ministry of Communications and Internet companies trusted as a negotiator. She had fought vigorously against the blacklist. When the law passed a second hearing in the Duma, on July 10, she urged Stas Kozlovsky, a leader of the Wikipedia community in Russia, to stage an online protest. Kozlovsky conducted surveys with the Russian Wiki community, and when he polled, 80 percent of them voted for the protest. For the whole day the work of the Russian Wikipedia was suspended, its pages went blank, and the main page of the site carried a banner with the claim that if the law is approved, it “could become the basis for real censorship on the Internet.”

Unfortunately the protest had no impact. The legislation was quickly passed, and Putin signed it into law July 28, to take effect November 1.

The new blacklist panicked Internet companies, and on August 2 they got an invitation to meet with the presidential administration. Among those who came were three high-ranking managers of Yandex, including the CEO, Arkady Volozh, and Marina Zhunich, a government relations director for Google Russia, along with Levova. They walked into the complex of the buildings on Staraya Ploshad, to a building right on the square, a big six-story neoclassical edifice with giant windows, the same building Velikhov had visited in 1982 to talk to Yuri Andropov about the personal computers. It had housed the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Soviet times and now was occupied by the presidential administration, a powerful bureaucracy.

They were shown to the fifth floor. The building had been expensively renovated, but the Soviet grand style was carefully preserved, with carpets in the corridors, wooden panels on the walls, and Soviet-style white telephones in the elevators. The Internet-industry representatives were brought into a large room with four monumental chandeliers. The curtains had been carefully drawn across the windows. Vyacheslav Volodin, the gruff-talking first deputy chief of the administration, personally greeted the gathering, along with officials from the State Duma and the Council of Federation.

The Internet companies had rushed to the meeting because of the technicalities of the new law, which stipulated that websites must be blocked at the level of an Internet protocol address. As thousands of sites can use the same Internet protocol address, the companies wanted to explain to the authorities that this idea was not wise. Volodin declared at the start of the meeting, “In present circumstances the filtration is necessary and inevitable, but we should work on details with the industry.” He made sure from the beginning of the meeting that the question of filtering was not open to question or debate.

It didn’t take long for the Internet companies to abandon the uncensored Internet and cross the line into accepting a censored Internet in Russia. Facing a fait accompli, they focused on specifics. Zhunich had a good reason to be worried: blocking an IP address meant that any video found inappropriate on YouTube, for example, could lead to blocking the entire service. Soon the talk turned to technologies that allow blocking of particular pages, not sites, and Volodin suggested forming a working group to talk technicalities. The Internet companies were passive, just as they had been when SORM was introduced more than a decade earlier. [18] Irina Levova and Mikhail Yakushev (a vice president of ICANN for Russia, present at the meeting), interviews with authors, July–October 2014.