Russia Lawmakers Pass Spying Law That Requires Encryption Backdoors, Call Surveillance (dailydot.com)

A bill that was proposed recently in the Russian Duma to make cryptographic backdoors mandatory in all messaging apps, has passed. Patrick Howell O'Neill, reports for DailyDot:A massive surveillance bill is now on its way to becoming law in Russia. The "anti-terrorism" legislation includes a vast data-eavesdropping and -retention program so that telecom and internet companies have to record and store all customer communications for six months, potentially at a multitrillion-dollar cost. Additionally, all internet firms have to provide mandatory backdoor access into encrypted communications for the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency and successor to the KGB. The bill, with support from the ruling United Russia party, passed Friday in the Duma, Russia's lower legislative house, with 277 votes for, 148 against, and one abstaining. It now moves to Russia's Federal Council and the Kremlin, where it's expected to pass into law.

Comments

Unenforceable law is unenforceable

[kheldan]

Non-Russian-based companies can't be compelled to comply with this, and furthermore some companies are sure to just completely pull out of Russia completely. Apparently Russian politicians are no smarter than politicians anywhere else, and apparently are uncomprehending of the fact that the Internet is not just inside Russia or controlled by Russia.

Re:Unenforceable law is unenforceable

[Anonymous Coward]

What media exactly do Russians NOT have access to? BBC, Voice of America, DW, Euronews, Forbes, The New York Times/IHT -- all accessible in Russian and most have Russian language content. If you don't like the Kremlin's message -- shout louder, but they are letting you shout to your hearts content to the the Russian audience. The critique of the Kremlin is they control all the over the air channels and in a middle income country where cable penetration is like 1/4 to 1/3 the means the Kremlin has the loudest voice but to make the leap that the nation is total misinformed and brainwashed implies that you simply think Russian people are apes. Most Russians have internet access. Nothing is stopping them from reading your Western media in the Russian language or in English. That they choose not to says more about the quality of Russia content in the Western media than anything else. Your Russia reporting is GARBAGE. The fact is Vesti and many of the other state owned news programs are VERY good quality. They may not be wholly objective but the bias is akin to the BBC's and less like Fox News/MSNBC but you Americans are free to keep believing whatever you like. Your image of Russia and Russians is more fiction than anything on Russian news. And the Kremlin is open about the bias in state media. They simply say freedom of speech doesn't mean the state shouldn't have the loudest voice. Nothing says the state can shout louder than you. Freedom of speech just saws they cant actively stop you from doing your bit of shouting.

Lets see how American .com's deal with this

[terraformer]

Will they cave, or will they stand tall? Because if they cave, the US and the world will follow Putin's lead.

Gilmore's Law no longer applies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Extend that concept a little to "... and Orwellian monitoring and social control", and we can talk about it.

Gilmore may have been correct... at the time he said it. But that was in an era of the net being dominated by technically astute people, rather than the Facebookian masses, who appear perfectly happy to tolerate any degree of central control and monitoring.

The internet no longer interprets these things as any sort of problem, and that allows nations like Russia, China, and many in the Middle East to use it as a tool of oppression, spying on their population, and trying to influence human behaviors. Also the US to use it as a means of constant surveillance of everyone, at all times.

So where is the "circumvention" now? It's absent. Sure, you can find the occasional neckbeard bemoaning the state of things, but those people are one in tens of thousands. Slashdotters like to say, "But GPG through TOR relays through VPNS!!!one!!" as if that is something that 99.999% of the world even understands. Face it, the voice of people wanting an open and free internet is a drop in the ocean of people who Just Don't Care, or actively Want That Control because terrorists.

So little by little, the walls close in. Each country is emboldened by the successes of the last who tried. Each step is not that big. Each little increment is tolerable. But in the end? The Internet That Was is destroyed, and the Internet That Is becomes more about being the ultimate tool of authoritarians.

I don't live in Russia. I have several Russian friends in Moscow. I am sad for them, just like they are for me RE: NSA. And we're both powerless to do much but watch.