While the struggle for the Internet continues in Russia, more and more users are learning to use means of circumventing Roskomnadozar’s restrictions: they are mastering VPNs and proxies, thanking the supervisory agency for the incentive to take up computer literacy. However, the question arises as to how legal it is to use these services, and since the country has so zealously begun to block the Internet, will they be punished for circumventing the bans.
When Roskomnadzor began (trying to) block Telegram, users only joked about the department and. Stories even appeared on social networks that saleswomen in stores were teaching how to use bypass tools.
Sergey Vasilievich
Now I drove to the nearest “Vkusville” for a fruit drink, there at the checkout a saleswoman about 45 years old was trying to explain to a customer about 60 years old how to set up a proxy in the cart in order to continue using the store’s bot.And although not everyone believed such stories, the number of people who started using proxies and VPNs increased sharply. As the owners of three services for bypassing blocking told the BBC, at least half of Telegram users (about 8 million people) continued to use the messenger through their services after the official blocking.
It is not yet known exactly how many people began to use bypass tools after Roskomnadzor began massively blocking IP addresses, but back on April 12, cybersecurity specialist Alexander Litreev told Vedomosti that his proxy service alone had a customer base that grew from nine thousand up to one and a half million. Also, according to Kommersant, the number of entries from Russia to the TOR network has increased by 20 percent.
However, some users began to have questions: is it even legal to use tools to bypass blocking?
Maria
Before installing a VPN, I was first concerned about the question of whether I could be imprisoned for this as a repost. I can't go to jail now(The question is quite reasonable, because back in November 2017, the ban on bypassing blocking through VPN, TOR and anonymizers came into force. However, it has its own nuances. This law prohibits the owners of such services from providing access to blocked resources. For refusal to comply, they promised to block VPN services, which happened in early March. Then RKN blocked 18 servers through which Telegram could be used.
Can users be held accountable for bypassing blocks? Not yet. The law, adopted in 2017, states that responsibility for providing access to prohibited sites lies with the “owner of the access software and hardware,” that is, the owners of VPNs and proxy services. They are threatened with blocking for failure to comply with the law. As for TOR, according to experts, it is almost impossible to block it (although they are trying in Belarus).
For the average user, this law can be compared to the law banning the sale of cigarettes to minors. If a teenager buys cigarettes, the seller will be punished, not the buyer.
On April 16, the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, who, according to him, installed a VPN on his smartphone, also said that ordinary users do not plan to be held accountable for using services to bypass blocking, reported in Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
When it comes to VPNs, you can't block them all. There are hundreds of thousands of them in Russia, both commercial and homemade. Is it possible to block individual VPNs? It’s definitely possible. We will look at what they use, whether they are used en masse, and whether it makes sense to limit access to VPN. But VPN, like any other Internet program, has a set of characteristics, IP addresses.
Lawyer and criminal law specialist Alexey Sinitsyn also told RIA Novosti that ordinary users will not be punished for using bypass tools.
Russian legislation does not provide for liability for users for the use of such services and networks.
Before the “war” with Telegram, the law banning services to bypass blocking was generally called useless. Despite the fact that the FSB was supposed to monitor the owners of services and prevent the provision of access to prohibited resources, in three months from the start of the document, the special services never contacted Roskomnadzor with a demand to limit the work of anonymizers, he wrote
The use of means in Russia to bypass blocks to access prohibited sites will be prosecuted by law from November 1. We discuss what VPNs and anonymizers are and what threatens those who decide to pretend that they have not heard about the new law in the “Q&A” section.
What are anonymizers?
Anonymizers are special sites (proxy servers) that act as an intermediary between you and the resource you want to visit. But at the same time, they will not be able to track your real IP address on the site, since you are visiting them on behalf of the IP address of the web proxy. An anonymizer has a narrower scope than a VPN, but their operating principles are similar.
What is a VPN?
VPN is virtual private network, in simple words, is a technology that provides secure communication of a logical network over a private or public network in the presence of high-speed Internet. Moreover, all information transmitted internally is reliably protected by encryption algorithms that form secure tunnels. Unlike a regular network, a VPN connection makes the transmitted information inaccessible from the outside and protects it from illegal use.
So, now you can’t use VPN services and anonymizers?
Federal Law No. 276 “On Amendments to the Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” does not prohibit the use of VPN services and anonymizers. The only point is that with their help it will no longer be possible to visit prohibited sites.
Owners of information and telecommunication networks and information resources through which access to sites prohibited in Russia are provided are prohibited from providing opportunities for viewing them. The display by search engines of links to blocked Internet resources is now also illegal; first of all, the ban applies to resources with pornographic and extremist content.
Thus, Russia intends to use the law to combat the spread of extremist materials and other prohibited information.
Who will monitor this and how?
Control is entrusted to Roskomnadzor. The Committee will create and maintain a federal state information system (FSIS), which will contain a black list of prohibited resources. At the same time, the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs will have the authority to find services that help gain access to sites blocked in Russia.
When contacted by law enforcement agencies, Roskomnadzor will identify a provider that allows the use of anonymizers. Notification will be sent to him at in electronic format about the need to provide data that will identify the owner of the anonymizer. The provider will have three days to provide the relevant information, TASS reports.
After this, Roskomnadzor will send the anonymizer a requirement to connect to FSIS. The resource will have to join the system in 30 days. Internet search engines operating in Russia will also be required to connect to FSIS at the request of the department.
After fulfilling the first requirement, anonymizers are given only three days to ensure compliance with the ban on providing the ability to use programs and other technical means in Russia to gain access to prohibited sites, and search engines are given the opportunity to stop issuing links to them. In case of refusal, such services will be blocked.
Can my home Internet be blocked if I search for a blocked site?
No. The law, which comes into force on November 1, 2017, does not contain grounds for blocking home internet when searching for prohibited sites.
The provisions of the new law will not apply to operators of state information systems, state agencies and local governments, as well as to cases of use of anonymizers, provided that the circle of their users is predetermined by the owners and their use occurs for “technological purposes to support the activities of the person carrying out the use.”
The law does not impose additional prohibitions, since we are talking about sites that are already blocked in Russia.
Deputies Maxim Kudryavtsev (United Russia), Nikolai Ryzhak (A Just Russia), Alexander Yushchenko (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) introduced a bill to the State Duma that proposes to ban the use of any special means and services on the territory of the Russian Federation that can be used to bypass blocking.
The document proposes to prohibit the use of “information and telecommunication networks, information systems and computer programs to gain access to information resources, including sites or pages of sites on the Internet, access to which is limited in the territory of the Russian Federation.”
In addition, the authors of the initiative propose to amend the Code of Administrative Offenses, according to which search engine operators will be punished for failure to fulfill obligations to gain access to the Roskomnadzor information system and stop issuing links that it contains. This “entails the imposition of an administrative fine on citizens in the amount of five thousand rubles; for officials - fifty thousand rubles; on legal entities- from five hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand rubles.”
They also propose to fine the owners of “information and telecommunication networks, information systems or programs for electronic computers that can be used in the territory Russian Federation to bypass access restrictions, or the owner of an information resource, including a site on the Internet, through which access to such information and telecommunication networks, information systems or programs for electronic computers is provided.”
In fact, this means that owners of VPNs and any other means of tunneling and proxying traffic will be fined. Punishment for them “entails the imposition of an administrative fine on citizens in the amount of ten thousand to thirty thousand rubles; for legal entities - from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand rubles.” Or, in case of repeated commission of an administrative offense, “the imposition of an administrative fine on citizens in the amount of thirty thousand to fifty thousand rubles; for legal entities - from three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand rubles or administrative suspension of activities for a period of up to thirty days.”
In the explanatory note, the authors of the bill write that “the practice that has developed since 2012 has revealed the insufficient effectiveness of blocking” and on the Internet you can still find links to blocked resources in search engine results, and you can also use technologies that allow you to gain access to blocked information resources :
“Technologies for directing the traffic of Russian Internet users through foreign servers, anonymous proxy servers, virtual private networks are legal, there is a wide range of possibilities for their lawful use, but these technologies are used to gain access to information resources, access to which is legally limited” .
The creators of the bill propose to provide owners of relevant networks and programs with access to the information resource of Roskomnadzor, which contains information about resources to which access is limited in Russia. If Roskomnadzor’s demands for a ban are not met within 30 days, it is proposed to limit access to information resources that provide the ability to “bypass blocking.”
Adviser to the Russian President on Internet development issues, German Klimenko, has already expressed his opinion regarding this initiative. In a conversation with Lenta.ru journalists, he clarified that the bill submitted to the State Duma does not imply a complete ban on VPN services and anonymizers such as Tor.
“A good question is whether this law will be effective, since most of the services that provide such services are located outside of Russia,” Klimenko noted.
Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of Entrepreneurs on the Internet Dmitry Marinichev, in a conversation with RBC, called the bill banning technologies for viewing blocked sites “madness.”
"All of this goes against common sense. The bill talks about technologies that allow you to bypass blocking. First of all, these are VPNs and anonymizers. How will they separate a VPN that is used for commercial purposes from a VPN that is used to bypass blocking? This impossible to determine,” Marinichev said.
An interesting commentary on what is happening was also published by Sarkis Darbinyan, lawyer, head of the Center for the Protection of Digital Rights and leading lawyer of Roskomsvoboda:
“Recently, many bad laws regarding Internet regulation have been introduced and adopted in the State Duma, but this one is one of the worst. It fits well into the trend of illiterate pressure on the network and infringement of digital human rights. But this time his legs grow not from the special services and the regulator, but from media lobbyists, MKS and Rostelecom, who are also not averse to following government agencies in monitoring users and censoring content.
The authors of the bill essentially propose to assign additional responsibilities to search engines, the same as telecom operators, for the daily unloading of domains that must be removed from search results, and to block technical services (for example, those described on openrunet.org) if they do not provide restricting access to sites included in numerous Roskomnadzor registers. If the law is passed, tools such as VPN and TOR will be completely blocked at the carrier level, since it is obvious that service administrators will not filter anything.
The legislative initiative is absolutely unviable. The experience of Asian countries with repressive political regimes shows that even blocking sites with distributions will not completely limit user access to VPN services, TOR exit nodes in different parts of the world and other means of traffic proxying.
The initiative looks especially funny in light of the latest news that, due to the vulnerability of the blocking system and the actions of Roskomnadzor, users have been massively deprived of access to completely legal sites. If these tools did not exist, it is unclear how users would even exercise their rights to access information. When the Constitution fails to protect, software tools come to the rescue. Now they want to limit us in this too.”
Chapter 13 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO), introduced a year ago by a group of deputies, was voted on by 306 members of the lower house of parliament.
More than 108 thousand sites with prohibited information were blocked in Russia, but the popularity of anonymizers is growing
Now, for failure to provide Roskomnadzor with data on the owners of means of bypassing blocking, citizens will be fined in the amount of ten thousand to thirty thousand rubles. For legal entities, the penalty is higher - from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand rubles.
Fines are also provided for search engines issuing links to prohibited sites. For citizens, the punishment can reach 5 thousand rubles, officials will pay from 30 to 50 thousand rubles, the highest fine for organizations is from 500 to 700 thousand rubles.
After the State Duma passes the final reading, the law will go to the upper house of parliament - the Federation Council.
Senators may consider it at their next meeting on June 20. If approved by the upper house and signed by the president, it will come into force 90 days after official publication, that is, in mid-autumn.
The amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses adopted by the State Duma are aimed at implementing the law banning anonymizers. It was adopted by parliament in July last year and came into force on November 1. The law establishes a ban on the use of information systems and programs to gain access to sites blocked in Russia. Units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB can participate in tracking the use of anonymizers; the document gives them the right to notify Roskomnadzor of identified cases for the subsequent blocking of means of bypassing restrictions.
By the way, blocking of such resources has been used since mid-April to restrict access to the Telegram messenger. In order to implement the relevant decision of the Tagansky Court of Moscow, Roskomnadzor has already blocked about 50 VPN services and anonymizers that provided access to the messenger.
In total, according to the department at the end of May, more than 108 thousand sites with prohibited information were blocked in Russia, but the popularity of anonymizers is growing. According to the head of the department, Alexander Zharov, over the past two years the number of users of such services has grown from five to seven to ten to fifteen percent. However, only a quarter of popular proxy and VPN services comply with current restrictions.
It should be noted that the requirements of both laws - both on the prohibition of the use of anonymizers and on liability for its violation - apply to all players in the digital market, both domestic and foreign.
However, the authors of the adopted law - deputies Maxim Kudryavtsev (United Russia), Nikolai Ryzhak (A Just Russia) and Alexander Yushchenko (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) - say that they have reached “full mutual understanding” with the owners of search engines and software.
Meanwhile
On Tuesday, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a draft law allowing the conclusion of inheritance agreements and the drawing up of joint wills of spouses. The initiative was introduced by the head of the Duma Committee on State Construction and Legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov. The bill introduces amendments to parts one and three of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which provide for new opportunities for Russian inheritance law - to conclude inheritance agreements and draw up joint wills of spouses. As the author of the initiative explained earlier, this will help “to agree in advance on the fate of the inheritance and thereby reduce the likelihood of conflicts involving persons who may be called upon to inherit.” For example, if there is a joint will of the spouses, there is no need to divide joint property and then resolve the issue of inheritance and heirs.
New fines for leaking customer databases
The Ministry of Digital Development proposed introducing fines for leaks of personal data into the public domain.
There are more than 400 thousand personal data operators in Russia, including hotels, carriers, mobile communication companies, and banks. On their behalf, other companies collect and process information, accumulate large databases (for example, insurance agents, aggregators), which often “leak” and are used in completely different ways - by marketers, fraudsters, cold sales specialists, and so on. Operators of personal data usually blame those who collected information for them for “leaks.”
According to the project, if the operator did not control the collection of data, then he will face a fine of up to 30 thousand rubles for one identified case of “leakage”. For persons who collect data on behalf of operators, fines in the same amount are projected for violating data processing rules.
In addition, the department proposes to limit the number of organizations that can publish data about orphans on the Internet. They intend to grant this exclusive right only to federal and regional authorities, which are responsible for the formation of a state data bank on children left without parental care, and the right to process biometric personal data of orphans for their placement in families will remain with executive authorities.
As of May 5, 2019, all instant messaging services operating in Russia must verify phone numbers upon registration.
In theory, they should send a request to the telecom operator. There they check whether such a number is in the database, and only if the answer is positive, you can register and send messages. And if there is no number or the user cannot confirm that this is his phone, registration should be prohibited, and messages will not be received.
Government Decree No. 1279 dated October 27, 2018
This procedure was approved last fall, but it will only come into force now. It is unclear whether all this will work in practice and how it will affect the use of instant messengers.
Instant messaging services that operate in Russia are required to check the user's phone number against a database of telecom operators. If there is no number or the user cannot confirm that it is his phone, they will refuse registration and prohibit communication.
A comment: It's unclear whether this will work. It may turn out like the ban on buying a SIM card without a passport: it seems impossible, but they are still being handed out at crossings. But the verification procedure has been approved and can be applied.
About VPN
The law potentially covers all proxy and VPN services, as well as anonymous networks Tor, I2P and Freenet. Their owners are asked to limit access to sites included in the Roskomnadzor register of prohibited sites.
Employees of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs will monitor anonymizers, Tor and VPN services that provide access to sites blocked in Russia.
The document also prohibits search engine operators provide links to resources blocked in Russia. (It’s not clear how Yandex should deal with this. And will Google be banned too?)
There have been changes to the information protection law. They were adopted to limit access to prohibited sites. The provisions regarding bypassing blocking will come into force on November 1, 2017.
The order states that only sites that allow access to gambling will be included in the register, and not any VPN service. If I don't break the law, won't I be prohibited from doing anything?
They will even prohibit it. There are no such criteria to segment the purpose of a VPN. Traffic encryption channels are used for different purposes. Someone to work on the marketplace or to sit on social networks without violating anything. And someone connects via VPN to play in a casino - this is a violation.
The Federal Tax Service may decide to block a site with such services, even if it simply contains information about options for bypassing blocking of online casinos and lotteries. And even more so if there you can download some program or connect a service to access a prohibited site.
This means that any site about VPN access is at risk, even if you do not intend to violate anything. If it works now, in a week it may no longer work.
I need a VPN for work, not gaming. What to do to avoid being blocked?
No one knows which specific sites are at risk of being blocked in the near future. If we take the wording of the order literally, then even information sites can be included in the register.
If you use a VPN for work or protection from hackers and do not gamble online, look for different legal options to access anonymizers just in case. Or think about how to work without a VPN.
Don’t expect it to blow through like with Telegram. This order was signed by the heads of four departments, and now they will be obliged to implement it.
I'm a regular user. Sometimes I use a VPN, but I don’t visit prohibited sites. Am I in danger?
You are in no danger. You can use anonymizers as much as you like for work, dating sites or computer games and visit any sites that are in the public domain.
If your usual VPN service suddenly stops working, it means that it did not want to comply with the law and was helping to bypass blocking. Find another one - there are many of them.
If it suddenly turns out that the site is blocked by decision of Roskomnadzor or work has stopped due to the fact that the messenger or VPN is not working, you can lose money or even your entire business.