Back in April of this 12 months, the Russian government put out a tender:
Previous week, Roskomnadzor, Russian Federal Service for Telecoms Supervision, announced a manifeste tender for building Net monitoring program. According to the tender, the spending budget for this sort of system is 15 million rubles (about $ 530,000) and the task applications really should be submitted by April 15, 2011. The technique requirements to be designed by August fifteen, 2011 and the screening time period must finish on December 15, 2011.
The mentioned goal of the monitoring system was fairly particular:
The significant target of the monitoring, at least in accordance to the Russian officials, is not classic media websites or weblogs, but comments at the on the internet media outlets (it is critical to note that the monitoring technique is supposed to be employed for the subject material of the websites officially registered as online mass media).
Here’s what it would be seeking for:
Michail Vorobiev, an assistant to the head of Roskomnadzor, instructed [ru] Russian data company RIA Novosti that the system’s goal was to discover content material identified by the Russian law as unlawful. This kind of system will be primarily based on two aspects: a storage that would have unlawful resources (some kind of “thesaurus of unlawful search phrases”) and the search system that will scan through the on the web house and evaluate the online text with the illegal subject material in the storage.
The description of the tender is a long and openly revealed document [ru], so what exactly the program must seem for is not a solution. The amount and the naturel of ambitions that the lookup robot really should achieve are surprising. It goes techniques over and above incitement of countrywide hatred or appeals to violence. In consists of not only terrorism, appeals to actions that threaten constitutional buy, materials that disclose classified safety info, propaganda of medication and pornography, but also untrue details about federal and regional officials, as nicely as content that threatens the liberty and secrecy of option for the duration of elections. Yet another interesting aim is to learn material with concealed embedded parts that find to affect subconsciousness. If it&rsquos not ample, the software would keep track of not only textual, but also visual material (pictures and video clips).
It’s hard to see how a method costing just fifty percent-a-million bucks could attain all that. And as Russian commentators have pointed out, permitting just a number of months for the improvement and screening is equally suspicious:
For instance, Maksim Salomatin from Park.ru says [ru] that the truth that participants of the tender should complete the operate on the system in not possible 3 months signifies that, most likely, Roskomnadzor has in mind some particular business that has by now worked on this program.
In other phrases, perhaps the entire tendering method was a formality, and items had already been moving ahead on this front in the track record for some time. Help for that principle arrives from the fact that even with the “extremely hard 3 months” of development, the method will certainly be rolled out up coming month:
Roskomnadzor, Russian telecommunications control body, will start subject material monitoring program in December 2011, Kommersant.ru reviews [ru]. The system ordered in March, 2011 (see GV analysis here) is now in pre-launch condition. Its documented talents allow the monitoring of up to 5 mln keywords and phrases revealed at the websites registered as on the internet mass media shops. It will also keep track of person comments. The professionals worry that the scale of monitoring will lengthen to non-registered weblogs and web sites.
As that factors out, the risk is that when this kind of a technique is up and working, it will be progressively prolonged to consist of initial “unofficial” media sites like weblogs, and then, ultimately, almost everything on the web. That may well also clarify why the tender rates these kinds of a ridiculously small figure: the ultimate method would be quite costly, but revealing that fact in the original tender would give away the genuine scope.
The issue then gets to be: what will the authorities do with all that details? Because 2010, Roskomnadzor has been in a position to call for on the web mass media to eliminate unlawful responses, so it will presumably do the exact same when content material is flagged up by the new system. But the quite breadth of the on-line lookup is troubling, such as as it does points like “untrue information about federal and regional officials”, something that could obviously be utilized from whistle-blowers.
Additionally, the risk the following is not just for Russian citizens. The moment again we are seeing a federal government striving to keep a a lot closer watch on crucial components of the Internet &ndash in this situation, mass media internet sites. Assuming it succeeds — or at the very least promises to have succeeded — that is very likely to motivate other international locations to do the identical.
Though it would be wonderful to feel that only “repressive” governments would even believe of undertaking these kinds of a factor, latest proposals by politicians in the US and Europe with regards to blocking internet sites and spying on end users indicate how naïve that would be.
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