About any black lists and Roskomnadzor are written not one ten habratopikov.
And today I will talk about a completely different way to ban sites , which has long been doing its dirty deed, but very quietly .

Prehistory

My name is Eduard Chernenko, I am the administrator of Absurdopedia .
We once got into the black list in the first month of his work, as the previous one was about: “Black lists: how we were suing Rospotrebnadzor (part 2)” .
As they say, it never happened, and here it is again.

It all started with the fact that I decided at the end of 2013 to google on a request like “Absurdopedia court”. Google gave this: rospravosudie.com/court-pyatigorskij-gorodskoj-sud-stavropolskij-kraj-s/act-428488026

[...] sites that offer offers for the illegal sale of weapons and information on how to make weapons and explosive devices in artisanal conditions [...] http://absurdopedia.net/wiki/How_right_to: manufacture_House_Bomb [... ]

And this is a comic story about cooking recipes:
')


“Wait,” the reader will ask, “This is not black lists (pre-trial blocking), but by a court decision! Where were you when the decision was made , why did you not come to court and did not present your arguments? ”

We return to the text of the decision and read the very pulp. And the very flesh is against whom the lawsuit was filed .
Parties to the case:
(A) a lawsuit was filed by the local prosecutor of a certain city of Ukhryupinsk (in our case, Pyatigorsk),
(B) filed against - a local provider (conditionally, Nekaia-Labuda Telecom LLC),
(C) other interested persons NO.

That is, you see what the problem is. The site owner is not notified at all , because the lawsuit is designed in such a way as if the site owner has nothing to do with it . The solution contains the following:

To oblige Svyazpostavka LLC to limit subscribers' access to the following Internet sites: [...] on which they offer illegal sale of weapons and information on how to manufacture weapons and explosive devices in artisanal conditions, by entering their IP addresses into filters on border routers .

What could end this thing - without the owner of the site?

Conventional Nekaya-Labuda-Telecom LLC from prohibiting any page is neither warm nor cold.
Most likely, he will not even come to court.

In the absence of objections from the defendant - in a Russian court, the prosecutor cannot lose the case.

The court makes a decision according to which the provider should ban the page, he does so.
The site owner is not notified and can find out about the decision only by chance - if a resident of the town of Ukhryupinsk (client of Nekaya-Labuda Telecom LLC, who does not open the site) informs him about it. And the term for contesting a decision in absentia is 1 month, and even if the site owner finds out about the decision, the term has already expired.

Another point is to challenge such a decision only in Ukhryupinsk (which may be thousands of kilometers from the site owner).

Why do prosecutors do this? This is a very simple way to improve your statistics . Indeed, a win-win case in which the defendant will not knowingly not object (since he is not interested in the outcome of the case), in which the defense will not bring expertise, call witnesses, etc. The prosecutor can conduct 10 cases per work day in such cases, and he will automatically win all of them.

Is it any wonder that this is not an isolated matter? Thousands of such cases , from prosecutors in various cities and villages .

What happened next: Absurdopedia is included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials

I was sitting at work in May 2014, debugging huge combat robots and space ships (I’m a programmer, accompanied RTOS for one and a half year for such things), and then a TJournal journalist knocks on Skype ( here’s their article of May 5, 2014 ) and asks (conditionally ): “Hi, do you know that you plunged into the Federal list of extremist materials?”

It turns out that the story had a sequel.
Not only the prosecutor of the small but proud city of Pyatigorsk likes to correct statistics, but also the prosecutor of the rather big and proud Stavropol Territory in which Pyatigorsk is located also loves it, and also owns the skills of Copy-Paste.

This prosecutor took 10 “cases against providers”, pulled out the website addresses and made the following claim:
rospravosudie.com/court-sovetskij-rajonnyj-sud-stavropolskij-kraj-s/act-447298443

All the same nonsense. The parties do not include the owners of any of the N sites, the solution is to perebany one and all, the period of appeal is 1 month. Copy-Paste is owned not only by prosecutors, but also by judges, and they are too lazy to look at prohibited pages.


(from the Ministry of Justice website, http://minjust.ru/ru/extremist-materials?field_extremist_content_value=http://absurdopedia.net )

How we challenged the decision in the Russian courts

We have challenged this decision, now I will tell you how.

Two lawyers are engaged in business, some of the best in the country:
* Damir Gainutdinov from Agora (specialist in cases of blocking websites),
* Marina Dubrovina (specialist in extremism cases).

Here is our claim .
The key argument is not to involve a person (me) in the case, whose rights are limited to a decision (according to article 364 of the Code of Civil Procedure of the Russian Federation, part 2, paragraph 4, this decision is subject to cancellation).

Rights violated in this case:
* Art. 29 of the Constitution (freedom of speech),
* Art. 44 of the Constitution (freedom of literary creativity),
* Art. 46 of the Constitution (the right to judicial protection).

For the latter, it should be noted that because of this decision, the opportunity arose:
1) bringing me to justice (including criminal, under 280/282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - up to 5 years in prison) for distributing material that was recognized as extremist,
2) blocking of any site on which material is posted.

These were the procedural grounds for revoking the decision.
Well, the position is essentially clear:
1) the material is a humorous story and does not fall under the definition of extremist material (paragraph 3 of Article 2 of the Federal Law "On Countering Extremist Activities");
2) the prosecutor and the court did not read at all what was forbidden.

We filed the application in August 2014, and received an answer on October 2.

Prosecutor: present the paper with the seals that this is your site

What does the Russian prosecutor who is caught on lawlessness do?
That's right, pours ash on his head and resigns from shame.
That's right, comes up with a new scheme to heighten the lawlessness.

It turns out this prosecutor and says: "And this, probably, is not your site, otherwise you would bring a certificate that he is yours." And none of the non-Russian registrars have heard of such references. Here, for example, in Internet.bs are genuinely surprised, why the hell does this need to be:

Dear Customer,

It is enough to prove your domain ownership. we do not provide any separate documents.

Best regards, [...]

At the same time, what kind of fool would register domains from the Russian registrar that are on the Federal List of Extremist Materials?

I refer to the story of Rutreker (when torrents.ru was divided into him) and to the recent “Reg.ru that he divided the domain of the“ Mnogohodovochka ”game” (there wasn’t even a prescription from the prosecutor’s office - just someone sounded that there’s extremism on the site divided the domain just to play it safe). By the way, one of the claims to “Mnogohodovochka” was that Voronezh had to be bombed there (a strictly comic meme).

And even if you get a paper from some foreign registrar (probably at least some of it is issued), it’s far from a fact that someone will take it in a Russian court. After all, extremism is a kind of crime against the state, what could be the attitude to the document from the “country of the conditional adversary”? (do not offer North Korean registrars)

Opinion of the Stavropol Regional Court

“Well done, beautifully otmazatsya”, - said the Stavropol Regional Court to the prosecutor and accumulated the definition of refusal to restore the term ( sheet 1 , sheet 2 , sheet 3 ).

Wherein:
1) the petition was considered without me and without a lawyer. At the same time, the definition says that we were notified by telegram (sic!), But neither I nor the lawyer received any telegrams.
2) the court raised the claim that Whois does not confirm ownership of the site.
3) the court prikopalsya to the power of attorney (they say, a copy is not certified), although a copy of the power of attorney is not required to provide any attorney (for them, the unique number that is made in the base of powers of attorney). Then, when I assured these copies, the notary for a long time was surprised that it was required somewhere.

Well, the most fun: the assistant judge (no reservation, with the assistant prosecutor not confused) began to intimidate my lawyer that, they say, I hadn’t been brought to criminal responsibility just because they could not find the author of such a "seditious site", and if we do not complain further, they will not do that .

BGG.
Proving that this is not extremism is my only defense.
And there will be no other defense when the next prosecutor wants to correct his statistics on the number of criminal cases.

Note that in a criminal case no one will prove that citizen N is the owner of the site. They will simply write: “The investigation established that N is the owner of the site,” and the court will whip it off.

In addition, if you do not dispute the "extremism" of the material, then there is a risk that later the investigation will not have to prove it. They will simply refer to the previous decision and say: “Here, the previous court has established” - on the principle of prejudice .

The prejudice (from the Latin. Praejudicialis - referring to the previous court decision) - the obligation for all courts considering the case to accept without verification and evidence the facts previously established by the court decision that entered into legal force in another case involving the same persons. Prejudice - Wikipedia

Our private complaint

To this definition, we filed a private complaint , in some places inspired by the Captain Obvious:

It should be noted that the site is not a real estate object and it is impossible to confirm ownership of the site by a certificate of ownership.

We decided to interrupt the property argument with the same prejudice. In the previous case against Rospotrebnadzor, there was a decision of the Obninsk City Court against me as the site owner. And we referred to it: they say that it was already established by some other court that I am the owner of the site, so we don’t have to prove it .

About this private complaint for a long time there was no rumor, no spirit, but quite recently I googled the decision on it on the same rospravosudie.com. Here is the solution . Apparently, the answer was delivered by the same staff of the Russian Post as the mythical “telegram” earlier, and it still has not arrived by mail to me or a lawyer. The summary of the decision is “yes, you don't care, but we don't care about prejudice” (formal formal reply).

Questions

Why is the site not listed in the Roskomnadzor registry? ("Black lists")
Most likely, because the original solution (Pyatigorsk / Stavropol) contains a typo in the URL of the page “How it’s right: Make a bomb at home” (the letter “n” in the word “right” is Latin “n”). Roskomnadzor is looking at the address specified in the decision, and there 404 Not Found. Well, I went further.

The root of the site (not the page “How to do it: Make a bomb at home”) briefly entered the registry from October 3-19, 2014. He was entered there without an IP address (such registry entries are not downloaded by providers, for example, there are many such entries in the registry of Wikipedia and they can hang there for years without causing blocking). Roskomnadzor did not specify the reason for entering (there was no notification about inclusion in the registry without the requirement to delete the page ), the reason for the exception, too.

And why in such decisions so many typos in the URLs?
Version number 1. Prosecutors do not really distinguish between the Russian letter "p" and the Latin letter "n".
Version number 2. If you ban the correct URL, then Roskomnadzor can add it to the registry and inform the site owner about this. And what is the purpose of the prosecutor? Quietly cheat yourself statistics, and that no one climbed to challenge. Therefore, it is possible that prosecutors make typos in the URL specifically .

Could it be possible to print reports from news sites about the previous case as evidence?
I will simply quote the tweet of the lawyer who struggled with blocking the site navalny.com:

The point is not that we did not convince the prosecutor, but that he intentionally acts to the detriment.
It will be profitable for him - he will deny the rotation of the Earth around the Sun.

Is there a threat of a criminal case for posting a page?
There is (Article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (clause 2), Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

We know that prosecutors regularly "monitor the Internet" (translated into human language - " google words like Bomb and start things up for everything that they will get in the search results"), and also copy-paste solutions from each other (so Pyatigorsk decision It became the basis for Stavropol - the prosecutor from Stavropol saw Pyatigorsk and a copy of the URL itself). Similarly, URLs can be copied from the recognition of an extremist page into a new criminal case. The motivation of the prosecutor is the same - improving their statistics.

This is a win-win case for the prosecutor. “Extremism” is considered a high-priority direction of the “struggle” for the state. In February 2014, the relevant articles of the Criminal Code were tightened . The President of Russia has repeatedly spoken about the need to combat extremism ( example 1 , example 2 ). Plus we have 1% acquittals. Justification for articles such as extremism is simply impossible.

Typical methods of protection are to deny the placement of the material (hello, and I filed an appeal in which I explicitly stated that I placed it), or lie on the ground and kiss the prosecutor's boots to plead "confession of guilt" in the hope of a condition (bgg).

The limitation period for extremist articles is 6 years.
Over the past year, the number of criminal cases on extremism has increased by 28% (and their number has been steadily growing for more than a year ).

Why not remove the page from the site?
And what problems will it solve?
* There is a court decision in which it is written that extremist material was placed on my website - the “crime” has already been committed.
* Roskomnadzor does not require page removal.
* From the list of extremist materials the site does not disappear from this. Same not black lists, and absolutely other mechanism.

What's next?
Further ECHR.

First, thousands of sites are blocked by such a flyer-scheme of prosecutors. All that can be done to stop it - you need to do.

Secondly, prosecutors therefore wind statistics on such cases, that it can be done quietly . Therefore, it is necessary to aggressively challenge and publicize such decisions of local prosecutors , and perhaps this alone (publicity) will be enough to demotivate this bad practice .

PS I am looking for a job outside of Russia (for obvious reasons).
System programmer (C), web programmer (Perl, PHP, JS), AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Linux sysadmin.
Summary , LinkedIn , GitHub .