In Russia, they began to block pages with instructions for circumventing locks

"RosKomSvoboda" crowdfunds back litigation

On April 13, the Anapa City Court of Krasnodar Region ruled to restrict access to one of the sections of the Rublacklist.net site. The resource operator is the RosKomSvoboda project, created to promote the ideas of freedom of information and self-regulation of the Internet industry.

The http://rublacklist.net/bypass/ page passed to the block contains detailed instructions on how to bypass the locks. It lists the use of proxy and VPN servers, special browser plug-ins, Turbo mode in browsers, Tor and I2P. In the decision of the court, the page was named “anonymizer”.

As stated in the case decision, thanks to anonymizing sites like http://rublacklist.net/bypass/ , users can access all prohibited sites by spoofing addresses and via anonymous access networks.

This differs from, for example, the interpretation of the term by the Internet Engineering Council : there , anonymizer is usually understood as a proxy server, which provides the user with privacy protection and anonymity. The interpretation of the term by the Anapa city court does not agree with RosComSvoboda either. The head of the legal practice of the project Sarkis Darbinyan said:
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“Anapa prosecutor once again demonstrated how far representatives of the supervisory authority are far from understanding both the network technologies and the essence of the activities of RosKomSvoboda, as a public organization. How can we rank the project on locks as anonymizers, we can only guess. Most likely, no one in the Anapa court at all understands what works, decisions are simply stamped, handed down in batches. At the same time, there is a violation of the fundamental principle of the civil process - the competitiveness of the parties. And this is already becoming common practice, when a court decision is made on the sly, without any notice to interested parties. ”

Darbinyan confirms that there are no anonymizers on the site, there is only an instruction on how to use them to gain access to information blocked in Russia.

Currently, anonymizers and anonymous networks are not prohibited in the Russian Federation. The ban on anonymizers was discussed in the State Duma in February of this year. Then it was proposed not to create a bill, it was about how the state should respond to the appearance of such "black holes" on the Internet. The idea of ​​deputy Levin was supported by Roskomnadzor . In the same month, Tor and anonymizers were banned in the Republic of Belarus.

It is also not prohibited to spread information about blocking over, said project leader Artyom Kozlyuk: “All information disseminated on the Internet resources of our organization is not prohibited by Russian laws or illegal, we are carefully monitoring this. Yes, we provide users with information about the means of restoring access to information, but this is not prohibited by law. ”

In addition to the “RosKomSvoboda” page, several more different resources will be transferred to blocking. They are also not anonymizers, but only contain information on gaining lost access to blocked pages. In some decisions, not only the norms of substantive law were incorrectly applied, but also facts were distorted, according to RosKomSvoboda. At the same time, when sending to block, some Russian Internet users will experience a complete loss of access to sites from the list. This is due to the implementation of blocking in some providers of communication services.

The members of RosKomSvoboda were not officially notified of the commencement of the trial, or of a court decision. Project representatives were not present at the process. The management of the organization learned about the incident from open sources.

RosKomSvoboda intends to appeal the court’s decision to block one of the pages of its website. To organize this process, the administration of the resource collects money. Ways to transfer money can be found at http://rublacklist.net/11503/ . Yandex.Money, PayPal, Bitcoin and Litecoin cryptocurrencies, as well as other methods on request are accepted for crowdfunding.

Updated 2015-05-30 10:00 : the administration of RosKomSvoboda received a notification from Roskomnadzor about blocking the page http://rublacklist.net/bypass/ .