Content filtering by state order. The case of educational blocking RosKomSvoboda

On February 6, 2017, in the Basmanny District Court of Moscow, the first court hearing on the educational blocking of the Roskomsvoboda website rublacklist.net was held. In the spring of last year, the project team became aware that in educational and cultural institutions in Moscow access to the public organization’s site is limited within the framework of non-vocational content filtering, which is provided by the telecommunications operator MGTS serving them. In the wake of complaints from users of the rublacklist.net website, lawyers from the Digital Rights Protection Center conducted an investigation and found out that MGTS does not provide end-users from metropolitan kindergartens, schools, technical schools and institutes (most of which, as it turned out, not even children, but employees and adult students) go to the site of RosKomSvoboda, because it is a contractor under the state contract with the Department of Information Technologies of Moscow (the latter orders communication and content filtering services for the Moscow Department of Education and its subordinate institutions).

At the stage of claim correspondence, the telecoms operator and departments took the position of ardent advocates of children, citing that the site’s content allegedly does not meet the goals of raising and educating children (initially, the rationale was different - extremist materials that were not found on the site). It remained unclear who did assess the pedagogical value of sites and compile filtering directories for MGTS. Previously, in the pre-trial correspondence, the telecom operator pointed to the commercial company “Secure Internet”. In the process, it turned out that one more company Step Logic was involved in blocking the organization's website, which supplies content filtering systems to MGTS.

The first court hearing on the case took place without consideration of the legal positions on the merits, because the defendants decided to submit their comments to the parties 5 minutes before the meeting literally at the door of the courtroom, the judge saw these reviews already at the very meeting (apparently, we will be suing in the old manner, The respondents had not heard for a long time, in a pile of papers, about e-mail and the electronic filing system. In addition, due to the mixed nature of the defendants, the judge decided to consider the case in administrative proceedings and therefore asked the representatives of the departments and all the other defendants to submit diplomas on the availability of higher legal education.
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The case was also brought Roskomnadzor as a third party, no independent claims.

It is gratifying that all parties to the case came to the court hearing on the educational blocking of the Roskomvoboda website - an entire team of three people arrived from the Information Technology Department (DIT) under the auspices of Andriyanova N.I.

At the meeting, the DIT representative behaved impertinently, slapped the printout of a 200-page government contract towards the CCPP lawyers (we actually read it online a long time ago) and tried to enter into an argument with a judge about the chosen procedure for considering a claim (according to the CAS RF). In a written review, DIT relies on just two reasons: 1. the department is an inadequate defendant (although it is a filtering customer); 2. The site administration does not have the right to dispute rublacklist.net content filtering (no comments). Hopefully, the military fervor of DIT will continue until the main meeting, when the court moves from collecting feedback from sluggish defendants to a direct hearing.

The position of MGTS is almost no different from what the communications operator wrote in response to the pre-trial claims of RosKomSvoboda. MGTS believes that the only criterion for the proper provision of services is the absence of prescriptions from the metropolitan prosecutor's office, which supposedly should carry out inspections in kindergartens, schools, universities, etc., all of a sudden students and employees will learn something superfluous from the Internet. Complaints of other persons of the telecommunications operator do not care, although the RosKomSvoboda team nevertheless appreciated the MGTS beautiful gesture with the replacement of the stub with “extremist materials” indicating that the administration of the website violated the law on protecting children from information.

Roskomnadzor, usually claiming to be the main censor of Runet, who has a monopoly on blocking, this time did not take either the administration of Roskomsvoboda site or the defendants, and timidly suggested that the court resolve the case on its own. At the same time, the service incidentally drew the court’s attention to the following:

- that one of the pages of the site was blocked for some time on the basis of the decision of the Anapa City Court of the Krasnodar Territory (due to information about online anonymization tools and tools for restoring access to information), but was eventually excluded from the Registry of prohibited information and more did not get.

- that the lawyers of the Center representing Roskomsvoboda did not provide evidence of the educational value of the information posted on the organization’s project site, such as, for example, the Roskomnadzor project’s personal data.

Apparently, Roskomnadzor is not well aware of educational projects of Roskomvoboda, such as SAFE , the organization’s research on legislation and law enforcement in the field of Internet regulation or on practical conferences on the development of cryptography.

In all three reviews, there was also a reference to the Methodological Recommendations on the restriction in educational institutions of access to certain types of information (approved by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2014), which allegedly were not disputed by the Claimant. It is in this recommendation document that such an occasion (not even a basis) for content filtering, such as “inconsistency with the tasks of education”, emerges. And although among the legal grounds for content filtering set forth in the law on the protection of children from information, there has never been such a reason and no, opponents continue to stubbornly refer to this illegal wording.

The Department of Education and Secure Internet LLC abstained from written objections.