Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media
The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media or Roskomnadzor is the Russian federal executive body responsible for censorship in media and telecommunications. Its areas include electronic media, mass communications, information technology and telecommunications; overseeing compliance with the law protecting the confidentiality of personal data being processed; and organizing the work of the radio-frequency service.
History
This Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications was re-established in May 2008. Resolution number 419, "On Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications", was adopted on February 6, 2008. In March 2007 the authority—then a subdivision of the Cultural Ministry of Russia called Russian Federal Surveillance Service for Compliance with the Legislation in Mass Media and Cultural Heritage Protection —warned the Kommersant newspaper that it shouldn't mention National Bolshevik Party on its pages, as the party had been denied official registration. In 2019 media criticized the service's choice of experts who are performing analysis of referred publications to assess their compliance with regulations. A number of experts recruited by Roscomnadzor are associated with pseudo-scientific and sectarian movements, including HIV-deniers, ultra-conservative, anti-vaccination and alternative "medicine" activists. Three of such experts—Anna Volkova, Tatyana Simonova and Elena Shabalina—assessed lyrics of popular rapper Egor Kreed in which they found "mutagenic effect", "satanic influence" and "psychological warfare". Also in 2019 Roscomnadzor published the first iteration of the "list of information resources who had in the past been spreading unreliable information" including a number of social media groups and media websites accused mostly of incorrectly reporting on a single incident in Dzerzhinsk in June 2019.
Service tasks
Roskomnadzor is a federal executive body responsible for control, censorship, and supervision in the field of media, including electronic media and mass communications, information technology and communications functions control and supervision over the compliance of personal data processing requirements of the legislation of the Russian Federation in the field of personal data, and the role of co-ordinating the activities of radio frequency service. It's an authorized federal executive body for the protection of human subjects of personal data. It is also the body administering Russian Internet censorship filters.
Blacklisted websites
On April 5, 2013, it was confirmed by a spokesperson for Roskomnadzor that Wikipedia had been blacklisted over the article 'Cannabis smoking' on Russian Wikipedia. On March 31, 2013 The New York Times reported that Russia was beginning 'Selectively Blocking Internet'. In 2014, during the Crimea Crisis, Roskomnadzor had a number of websites criticising Russian policy in Ukraine blocked, including the blog of Alexei Navalny, Kasparov.ru and. Also, on June 22, 2016 Amazon Web Services was entirely blocked for a couple of hours because of a poker app.
In October 2014 GitHub was blocked for a short time. On December 2 GitHub was blocked again for some satiric notes, describing "methods of suicide", which caused major tensions among Russian software developers. It was unblocked on December 4, and GitHub had set up a special page dedicated to Roskomnadzor-related issues. All content was and remains available for non-Russian networks.
Russian Wikipedia
On August 18, 2015, an article in Russian Wikipedia about charas |Чарас was blacklisted by Roskomnadzor as containing propaganda on narcotics. The article was then rewritten from scratch using UN materials and textbooks, but on August 24 it was included in the list of forbidden materials, sent to Internet providers of Russia. As Wikipedia uses HTTPS protocol to encrypt traffic, effectively all of the site with all language versions of Wikipedia was blocked in Russia on the night of August 25.
Adult content
In September 2016, adult websitesPornhub and YouPorn were blocked by Roskomnadzor as containing adult pornographic content. The watchdog says that they are not in the market and the demography is not a commodity.
''The Daily Stormer''
In 2017, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer was briefly moved to a Russian domain, but Roskomnazdor subsequently acted to remove its access, and the site was subsequently moved to the dark web.
On April 16, 2018, Russia's federal censor ordered Russian ISPs to start blocking access to the instant messenger Telegram. Soon, the government censor also banned millions of IP addresses belonging to Amazon and Google.
