The court, having no access to the Internet, supported the blocking of RosKomSvoboda in educational institutions of Moscow

With his last decision, the Basmanny Court actually confirmed for the Department of Information Technology of Moscow and MGTS the right to block anything and anywhere at its own discretion. At the same time, blacklists of sites can be formed by commercial organizations such as Secure Internet LLC independently and automatically, without the need for any verification of data, examination and the existence of legal grounds.



On February 22, 2017, in the Basmanny Court, the first (and essentially the last) hearing in the first instance on the merits of the case on educational blocking of the RosKomSvoboda website took place.

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All the Defendants came to the hearing - representatives of the Information Technology Department of Moscow (DIT), the Moscow Department of Education, MGTS, Safe Internet LLC, and an employee of Roskomnadzor also came, which we, lawyers of the Digital Rights Protection Center , were pleased with, had the opportunity ask questions to each of them in order to establish the true reasons for restricting access to the website of the public organization "RosKomSvoboda" at educational institutions in Moscow. But, given the high city status of the two defendants, the court did not give us the opportunity to conduct a full-fledged civil process on conditions of equality of the parties and competition.



But first things first.



Just before the start of the meeting, Secure Internet LLC, providing content filtering for MGTS, decided to submit a review at the last moment.





As follows from the recall of Secure Internet Ltd. (and confirmed by the position of other defendants in the case), they themselves do not consist in contractual relations with MGTS, but they provide a certain STEP LOGIC LLC with a non-exclusive license for the developed software for content filtering. At the same time, there was not and is no expert with special knowledge in the field of pedagogy. As the Respondent himself points out, “the program could automatically determine an increased likelihood of attributing the internet site rublacklist.net to the category of internet resources undesirable for access in educational institutions of the city of Moscow.”



Thus, from the explanation of the company, it follows that the categorical decision to block the project site was taken by the bot, over which the person is powerless.



The process began with the fact that we filed a petition for online video broadcasting of the meeting on the smartphone of RosKomSvoboda’s head Artem Kozlyuk, since the process is of public interest and a rather large audience of Russian citizens would like to follow the course of this court session. All the defendants were against the video broadcast and refused to substantiate their objection and the presiding judge, without hesitation, refused the petition, referring to the fact that this could violate the rights and legitimate interests of the participants in the process. Fortunately, the procedural legislation does not contain the need to coordinate Twitter broadcasts , which Artem willingly took advantage of.



Check out, there is a lot of epic, for example, like this:





The rest is here:





After the announcement of the grounds and subject of the claims, the court invited the parties to supplement the legal position on the case. In addition to the voiced theses that information about the site is not contained either in the Unified Register of Roskomnadzor or in the register of extremist materials of the Ministry of Justice, and there are no at least any legal grounds and solutions that make the information on the RosKomFreedom website illegal, we also told the court that the project team is making a lot of efforts to fill the resource with valuable information related to the transparency of the activities of state bodies to restrict access to websites, and to inform a wide range of users about new om Internet law and its practice. In addition, Roskomsvoboda launched a number of independent projects aimed at improving digital literacy. As an example, the “SAFE” project was given, designed to help users improve their own information security and reliably protect their private communications. Undoubtedly, this project can be attributed to educational, the value of which is no less than the educational project of the RKN personal data. The children referred to by the regulator in the process when voicing their position.



The Head of the Administrative and Legal Department of the DIT, Mrs. Andriyanova, who independently assumed the role of the Chief Respondent in the case, began her presentation by showing the court screenshots of the post from Habra on 02/14/2017, allegedly confirming the dishonesty of the stated requirements in order to popiar on the good name of DIT.



Then began a very interesting passages, the essence of which was as follows:



- the Claimant’s violated right has not been proven, since, according to Respondent, the Claimant’s independent right is not a free distribution of information, and there is no evidence that RosKomSvoboda has the right to act in the interests of citizens who have access to the site;



- Anonymous experts DIT, whom the representative trusts, said that the site has content that is prohibited for distribution. She herself did not see him and did not check the links, but condemns;



- there are no objective reasons for restricting access. All grounds are subjective, and the site is blacklisted for the reason that it was decided by a professional organization that deals with content filtering for MGTS. At the same time, no examination of the content is required, as well as the Department’s duty to be guided only by the grounds specified in the law on child protection, the law on information and the methodological recommendations of the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Communications and the Council of the Federation;



- access to the site was closed in order to avoid the views of prosecutors when carrying out checks on access to prohibited content in schools;



- the customer of the services is the DIP in the interests of the Department of Education, and the contractor is MGTS. There is a civil contract. All parties are satisfied with its execution, while the rights and legitimate interests of other persons are not affected by the said state contract. Andrianov compared the filtering at the level of subordinate educational institutions with the home filter that parents apply for home devices and personal gadgets of the child. And this means that the Department can block everything that it deems necessary.



Andriyanova optimistically finished her speech with the following comment on the Plaintiff’s thesis on the educational value of the SAFE project:

“Why do we need RosKomSvoboda to protect the digital rights of citizens. The law of Spring has already defended us all. ”

Apparently, the tasks of DIT include not only non-transparent deep self-censorship, but also the formation of a loyal attitude to the most odious project of recent years in the field of Internet regulation.



The speeches of the representatives of other defendants were very laconic. All the participants agreed with the speaker from the DIT and asked to reject the claim. At the same time, no one took the responsibility for blocking the site, continuing to refer to STEP LOGIC LLC and Secure Internet LLC, which, according to all participants of the process, with their algorithms, reasonably rationalized the project site for both children and adult students. and working employees.



The representative of Roskomnadzor noted that the agency did not oversee the educational institutions, and left the decision to the discretion of the court. At the same time, he stressed the presence of a certain value of some of the resources of RosKomSvoboda, although he recovered later that, whatever the case may be, the site believes it does not meet the objectives of education.



Further, the judge, having considered the positions stated, proceeded to study the case materials, thereby showing that he was ready to finish the process for making a final decision.



Understanding the mood of the court, who did not dare to dare against the authority of the Moscow Government and its Departments, lawyers of the Center for the Protection of Digital Rights, representing the Russian Freedom Association, stated a number of procedural motions in order to clarify all the circumstances of the case:



‣ A motion to postpone the trial in order to prepare a response to the last-minute objections from Secure Internet LLC, as well as to apply for a specialist to give an opinion on the case. The court refused without explanation of motives.



‣ A petition for the interrogation of a witness, the head of STEP LOGIC LLC for giving evidence, who exactly and on what basis made the decision to restrict access to the project site. The court refused without explanation of motives.



‣ A petition for engaging STEP LOGIC LLC as a third party, since the decision may affect their rights and obligations, including the exclusion from the black lists of sites. The court refused without explanation of motives.



‣ A request for the Respondent, in the person of MGTS, to submit an agreement with STEP LOGIC LLC to study the mutual rights and obligations of the parties and the procedure for rendering filtering services. The court refused without explanation of motives.



‣ A petition for inspection of the RosComFreedom website on the Internet in accordance with Art. 74 CAS to investigate the presence of “illegal content” referred to by the respondents. The court denied with the motivation that the court has neither the Internet nor the computer.



Nobody participated in the debate except the plaintiff. The lawyer of RosKomSvoboda stated that he considers the actions of the Defendants to block the site of a public project as an obvious abuse of the right, carried out without any legal basis. At the same time, the actions of the defendants led to the restriction of the Claimant’s right and the entire project team to distribute their own content among tens of thousands of users using MGTS channels to access the Internet in educational institutions in Moscow.



After 15 minutes of lively discussions in the court’s corridor (during which the DIT representative, Mrs. Andriyanova, tried to prove to us that her full name without any other bindings are already personal data and we cannot publish them without her consent) parts of the solution. The judge, who apparently doubted for a long time between the commercial contract of the two organizations and the constitutional right to distribute and access information, rendered a decision in the case, which refused RosKomSvoboda to satisfy the suit in full, in fact recognizing the right to block anything from the Information Technology Department networks provided by MGTS in the educational institutions of the capital.



The court decision in the final form is not yet ready. At the same time, we state the fact of an increase in internal self-censorship, which was the result of the information security policy conducted by state bodies in recent years and the restriction of children's access to illegal content on the Internet.



Naturally, we will appeal this decision of the court in higher instances.