Chemistry under lock and key

The day before yesterday (August 13), Vladimir Zykov in Izvestia announced the plans of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (which unfortunately reached the draft stage) aimed at banning mentioning methods and technologies for manufacturing explosives and explosive devices in the media and on the Internet. The bill provides for fines that can reach a million rubles, as well as blocking sites and seizing computers.

On the surface, the goal of this bill is good: its official goal is to prevent explosions. Izvestiya cites the opinion of Anton Korobkov-Zemlyansky (a member of the Public Chamber), according to which only one schoolboy who has read the Internet can, with great lightness, lead a non-residential building into a high-rise building.

Why is this legislative initiative can and should cause deep hostility of the majority of Internet users?
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Firstly, because website blocking has an impact on the Internet that is no less destructive (although less deadly) than explosives in the real world.

If a schoolchild is able to destroy a whole high-rise building, blocking by IP (and this, gentlemen’s readers, today is the main blocking method imposed in Russia) with no less lightness destroys the activity of the whole hosting server, stopping the work of a great many sites, most of which have no connection with closed - except for the fact that they all had the misfortune to use the services of the same hosting provider (but most often did not have the slightest ability to foresee and prevent what happened).

For example, programmers on Node.js recently made any useless attempt to open nodewebmodules.com via Rostelecom (or even through another provider that has Rostelecom in uplinks) —the white screen of death opens instead:



Secondly, abuses are inevitable.

The customs of the current legislators boil down to the fact that abuses are not prevented - on the contrary, the practice of abuses is eventually introduced into the letter and spirit of the law.

Has it not become known to all of us recently that it was the preparation of just such a bill that would make the lawful previous practice of all abuses of the law on the removal of information from the Internet that is not suitable for children?

• For example, Habrahabr bloggers fought in court ([ 1 ], [ 2 ]) for the right to make fun of suicide - and the bill officially ridicules this ridicule with propaganda.
  
• For example, the jaws dropped at the sight of closure for the “drugs” of the popular EVE Online game site (which just described the use of fictional chemicals to fictional characters) - and now the bill will also ban information on how to use “substances that have similar narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances effects on the human body. "
  
• The definition of “child pornography” has been expanded to such an extreme that ksenobayt rightly remarked : this is done as if on purpose in order to meet precisely my fears about banning anime. The initiative to block “audio, video and (or) textual information aimed at arousing sexual feelings towards minors or justifying sexual behavior towards minors” will affect such a wide range of works that, according to the letter of the law, it will be easy to block even Tatiana Larina’s letter to Onegin (after all, this is a love letter from a thirteen-year-old heroine ) or Shakespeare’s tragedy about Romeo and Juliet’s love. Enforcement practice is unlikely to affect the classics, but a number of contemporary authors (and not even ordinary fans of their works), even if indirectly using similar plot elements, will be categorically considered pedophiles, and their sites will undergo an IP destructive web block.

Is the new MVD bill free from the possibility of its abuse? In no way free. Using the example of the EVE Online case, we saw that the repressive apparatus of the Russian state was suddenly distracted by the network players, who had made the fictional bioactive chemistry part of the plot of their game, from catching real drug dealers who donated drugs from the state-controlled Afghan territory. Similarly, the new draft law from the Ministry of Internal Affairs will inevitably replace the dangerous and bloody catch of real demolitions (some religious fanatics in those southern republics of Russia where this problem is still quite acute) with network repressions against random individuals with their references to chemical processes and explosive devices, sometimes again fictional in whole or in part.

For example, “ Fight Club ” by Chuck Palahniuk (and even “ The Mysterious Island ” by Jules Verne) mentions nitroglycerin and gives the recipe for making it. (Do you think someone will understand the extent to which the author prudently distorted the recipe so as not to introduce readers into temptation?)

And will school textbooks of chemistry be subjected to the removal of references to the explosiveness of the simplest chemicals? Well, for example, such as a mixture of hydrogen with oxygen in a known proportion? (This mixture, by the way, plays a plot-forming role in the finale of the Julevern's “ Experience of Dr. Ox. ”, For example.)

And what about the “ Krakatit ” of Karel čapek?

And those computer games about the war (or other clashes), in which the player not only sets a mine (or another "hell machine"), but also collects it first?

Many, many abuses are possible. And the experience of the law enforcement of the previous laws on blocking Internet sites shows us most clearly that these abuses are inevitable after the adoption of the law, and not even directly planned by the lawmakers.