Slashdot Mirror
New Russian Law To Forbid Storing Russians' Data Outside the Country
TechWeek Europe reports that on Friday Russia's parliament passed a law "which bans online businesses from storing personal data of Russian citizens on servers located abroad[.] ... According to ITAR-TAAS, the changes to existing legislation will come into effect in September 2016, and apply to email services, social networks and search engines, including the likes of Facebook and Google. Domain names or net addresses not complying with regulations will be put on a blacklist maintained by Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications), the organisation which already has the powers to take down websites suspected of copyright infringement without a court order. In the case of non-compliance, Roskomnadzor will be able to impose 'sanctions,' and even instruct local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to cut off access to the offending resource." According to the article, the "measure is widely seen as a response to reports about the intrusive surveillance practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s GCHQ. Edward Snowden, who revealed sensitive data about the operations of both, is currently residing in Russia, with his asylum application up for a review in a couple of months." The writer points out that this would mean many web sites would be legally unavailable altogether to Russian users.
There are plenty of countries that already do this at the federal and state/provincial levels. And a lot of companies are following suit, especially after privacy laws have been toughened up by federal law.
Om, nomnomnom...
I wonder how such a thing is going to be enforced. Seems to me this is more about burdening Russian companies who use western services than it is about securing the privacy of Russian citizens. Besides if Putin forces all Russian companies to keep their data local then his cronies can more easily do their own spying on it, rather than have to beg the NSA to give them access, which given Russia's frosty relationship with the US, is probably pretty much cut off these days.
Don't be naive. The only reason Russia and other oppressive nations pass laws like these is so they can better monitor what their 'citizens' are doing and saying. It's a lot easier to lock up whoever wrote "Putin Sucks" online if the data is in a Russian server.
Nationalism aside it's not a bad idea, since having your medical records sent to the Phillipines for data entry and many similar stupid shortcuts are bad ideas. If your sensitive information is being stored in a different legal juristiction where people speak a different language there's not much you can do if someone wanders off with it and puts it to other uses unless you have as many international lawyers on staff as IBM.