Blog No Evil

Whilst the world is still following the story of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down last July close to the Ukrainian-Russian border and the ensuing fiasco relating to the investigations, nobody was really watching what was happening deep inside the Kremlin and the international reports regarding a new ‘draconian’ blogger’s law signed by Putin went almost unnoticed.

Under a newly enacted infamous Russian law, bloggers with more than three thousands visits a day will need to register with a government-controlled central monitoring body as well as provide their personal details. This essentially means that under these rules the Internet will be almost considered identical to traditional media and that the option of remaining anonymous has been wiped out. This law comes hot on the heels of another highly controversial piece of legislation which was approved by the Russian parliament that internet companies will need to store Russian citizen’s personal data inside of Russia itself.

The new blogger’s law has attracted widespread scorn from all parts of the world especially human rights and internet rights groups, claiming, rightfully, that this is just the recent Russian foray into curbing internet freedoms and freedom of expression. It basically states that bloggers cannot remain anonymous and the state will have more control on how to control online dissent. Commentators fear that this legal development will also be used to legally justify the blocking of foreign sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Earlier this year, other controversial laws where introduced in the land of Eisenstein and Rachmaninoff. Government has now powers to block websites without any legal requirements to provide any real and concrete justifications. Just recently, Putin termed the internet as “a special CIA project”. This summarizes the philosophy that the Russian government is enveloping the internet in. Providing asylum to Edward Snowden and publicly thanking him for revealing to the world some of the ways with which the NSA operates is by no means sufficient to place Russia as an internet freedom champion.

Unfortunately, internet censorship is increasing in all parts of the globe and has not remained the realm of countries like North Korea or China. Only in April of this year, the Turkish Constitutional Court overturned a government imposed ban on Twitter and Youtube.

The situation gets further compounded by the fact that the latest legislative masterpiece promulgated by the Russian Duma also includes a provision which obliges internet companies such as search engines, social networks and telecom infrastructures to retain computer records in Russian territory for at least six months. This is in stark contrast with the recent pronouncements made by the European Court of Justice which in a landmark ruling stated that the European Data Retention Directive was disproportionate and did not sufficiently safeguard the right of privacy of data subjects.  

In any case, as has happened with any other law blocking some aspects of the internet, such as ISP blocking regarding to online copyright piracy, people are already busy finding novel ways in which the blogger’s law can be effectively bypassed through technology. Such activities would include utilising proxy servers as well as ‘tweaking’ the ways in which page visits are counted in order to keep the number below the 3,000 mark.

Now consider this. The Russian population totals 144 million whilst that of Malta is a meagre 400,000 plus. If one had to use the same per capita calculation to assess the limit that should be imposed in Malta for the introduction of a similar law, the result would be eight visits a day. If such law was enacted here, almost everyone would need to register with central government.

Freedom of opinion and expression are sacrosanct human rights and any attempt to silence your rights to freely express yourself through internet tools is despicable, irrespective whether we agree or otherwise with the position taken by the blogger concerned.

The applicability of the universal human right of freedom of expression has also been recognised by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations by means of a specific resolution of 2012 which was also signed by Malta. The principle behind this resolution is simple: the rights that apply offline, including Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, should also apply online.

The fact that Malta is trying to reinforce these basic internet rights through a recent bill to amend our Constitution reflects the importance that such rights, even though we now here take them as a given, have to be protected. Needless to say, the Russians think otherwise. No wonder they did not sign the UN resolution altogether. The internet should never be silenced, irrespective of politics.