Blocking Roskomnadzora Anthem of the Russian Federation

I will describe my experience of communicating with Roskomnadzor and the prosecutor's office on the issue of blocking the site, who can be useful. There are more legal aspects than IT, but from the bag and the Unified Registry do not promise.

According to statistics, the Federal Service for the Supervision of Communications in its entire history has blocked about 500,000 sites (pointers to pages), and about 10 million more - illegally blocked due to the negligence of being on the same IP with the violator. I think of these hundreds of thousands and millions there are people whose rights were violated by lawlessness and who would like to protect them. A small educational program below.

The essence of the matter: there is in our region the news Site A, - let's say, opposition. In 2016, his domain was blocked by the court. For what - it is not known. The site went underground.
My news website B has, among other things, the function of news aggregator, well, I made a separate feed for news from Site A.

At the beginning of this year, I receive the first notice from Roskomnadzor about the need to remove information from my site - that very tape. Changed the URL. A couple of months again. In both cases, the reason for blocking indicated a court decision of 2016 regarding site A. My website has no prohibited information, but there are also enough political motives to close it. Knowing that Roskomnadzor loves to block what is not needed, and often forgets to unlock what is needed, it becomes a bit dumb.

I do not know about others, but my experience with Roskomnadzor is similar to unrequited love - you write to him, but he does not respond. You write to him, but he does not answer ... Except for those wonderful moments of the ruthless struggle against Telegrams, when Roskomnadzor, as an instinct of self-preservation, manages to block itself from receiving letters from Gmail, and then you receive a sad message that the addressee is unavailable.

Therefore, when this delicate question arose, it was decided, without unnecessary romance, to go straight to intim - an administrative lawsuit was filed to the district court about the wrongful actions of officials (entering the website address into the notorious single registry). The prosecutor's office of the republic, the regional department of Roskomnadzor and Roskomnadzor itself were indicated at random as respondents. As it turned out, I guessed right - the prosecutor's office turned to the local Roskomnadzorschik, they were sent to Moscow.

On June 19, 2018, a court hearing was held in a small village of five thousand people on the outskirts of our vast country. The interests of the republic's prosecutor's office were represented by the district prosecutor of the Latvian Latyshkov A.V., famous for having filed a lawsuit in the same court last year about blocking the article “Army” on Lurka — found methods of repose there. Thus, Andrei Voslavovich in information technology is not a boy.

The interests of Roskomnadzor on the system of judicial videoconferencing (to go far) were represented by an employee of the regional office of Sokolovsky AV, - moreover, the interests of both Roskomnadzor. As a representative of the regional government, he denied his involvement, stating that he had done nothing and that he was an inadequate defendant. Speaking on behalf of the federal service, he argued that they had done everything correctly. Controlled schizophrenia, and not very successful, because often Andrei Vladimirovich was confused about who he is now, bringing tangible confusion in the proceedings.

The main profit of looking at Themis was, of course, getting a copy of the very court decision of 2016, according to which you are blocked. It deserves a separate post on Habré, but I will briefly describe. Many people are probably interested in when they block a separate page of the site, and when the whole site. There are separate laws - the “Law of the Meadow”, for example, which clearly speaks about blocking the entire site for appeals to mass perturbations and other extremism. Simpler cases are incomprehensible. Here is just such an option to move from blocking the page to blocking the site.

According to the prosecutor's office for several years on Site A, four cases of publication of information recognized by the court as prohibited for distribution were recorded. To make it clear, the personal data of a person or the word “Katsap” in the comments to an article may well be, if desired, recognized by the court as prohibited information to be disseminated. Site A suffered precisely because of the commentators.

And now the prosecutor's office is filing a lawsuit in the interests of the Russian Federation and an indefinite number of persons about " recognizing the Internet site as prohibited ." Declaring that "the prosecutor made demands in accordance with article 45 of the CCP RF, since the distribution of such materials undermines the social stability of society and creates a threat of harm to the dignity) of the person, personal integrity of an indefinite number of persons and undermines the foundations of the constitutional system of the state, this activity violates public interests Russian Federation . "

As an offtopic from the “judges joking” series, I’ll give a part of the court decision in which participants in the process are trying to determine the owner of Site A, which they are going to block. The owner of the site knows the latest assistant prosecutor, but they do not want to invite him to the court, because they imitated a stormy search.


So, the judge writes in his conclusions in the decision:

Thus, the foregoing testifies to the fact of repeated dissemination of information materials on the Site A site, the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation.

The court agrees with the arguments of the prosecutor that these circumstances testify to the sustainability of this Internet resource for the dissemination of information prohibited in the Russian Federation, which is the basis for the recognition of this Internet site as information that is prohibited throughout the Russian Federation.

At the same time, the possible presence on the website of Site A, in addition to prohibited materials, other materials that are not prohibited, is not an obstacle to the recognition of this website as a whole as prohibited, since partial recognition of the Internet resource as mentioned prohibits the risk of further dissemination on this website. site of such prohibited information.

A little earlier in the decision, he gives the definitions:

By virtue of paragraph 1 of Art. 2 of the Information Law, information is recognized as information (messages, data) regardless of the form in which they are presented.

A website on the Internet is a set of programs for electronic computers and other information contained in an information system, access to which is provided by means of the information telecommunication Internet network by domain names and (or) by network addresses that allow identifying sites on the Internet (13, Article 2 of the Law on Information).

Well, the operative part:

Recognize information - a site on the Internet Information and Communication Network Site A as information whose distribution in the Russian Federation is prohibited.

So, firstly, we have that “the grounds for recognizing this Internet site as information prohibited on the entire territory of the Russian Federation” are four facts when the court established that the distribution of the prohibited information was spread. Moreover, the legal basis of this "grounds" are absent.

The second, according to the Law on Information and within its framework, is, roughly speaking, a concrete compact set of numbers, letters, bits. What can be identified. We draw attention to how the court moves from a concrete concept of information to an abstract one in a decision. And how the concepts of website and information merge. This is important for further.

Well, now our most humane court, in my lawsuit. A long, funny story, I’ll just note my requests to prove that I took these articles from Site A (they are on other resources - all news sites reprint each other), and not Site A from my Site B (there were also such articles ) and the question of how the prosecutor’s office determined the identity of the information (my site was called a “mirror”) was not answered.

Or, for example, Roskomnadzor sent a copy of his decision to include a page pointer in the Unified Register. Screenshots of both sites are attached to it (taken when a decision is made with identical information), they can see the Windows date: a screenshot of Site B taken on January 9, 2018, a screenshot of Site A - May 23, 2018. The decision itself is dated April 20, 2018. In general, who sued the officials, he knows all this madness well.

Well and most importantly: Roskomnadzor sent an objection on 8 pages, where he explained his case in detail. On page 3, the key conclusion is highlighted in bold:

Thus, the Roskomnadzor is charged with the obligation to limit all information identical to that posted on the Internet site on Site A, including that hosted on other information resources.

I read it out loud and appeal to the representative of Roskomnadzor:
- Andrew Vladimirovich. Do you support this statement?
- Yes.
To the prosecutor:
- Do you agree with the position of Roskomnadzor?
- Of course, I support.
- That is, all information taken from Site A becomes prohibited?
- Yes
- Andrei Voslavovich, answer the question. If the text of the National Anthem of the Russian Federation is published on Site A, and I rewrite it to myself, will you block the page of my site with it?

A moment of silence. Finally, a solution was found
- This is not currently subject to review. We have specific materials.
Representative of Roskomnadzor:
- Andrei Vladimirovich, if the text of the Anthem of the Russian Federation will be published on Site A, and I will reprint it one-on-one, will you block my site?

The answer is worthy of being heard - yadi.sk/d/IOG3rvU93Y8Hxm
The representative of Roskomnadzor. No comments.

The court in the lawsuit expectedly refused.

The next step is simple:
1. Publication of the Anthem on Site A
2. Reprint of the Anthem on Site B
3. Recognition through the prosecutor's office, Roskomnadzor and the court of the Anthem of the Russian Federation information prohibited for distribution on the territory of the Russian Federation.

In principle, from the court decision of 2016, this follows immediately after point 1. But it will have to suffer with Russian double standards.

And now I would like to return from where I started. Roskomnadzor has blocked millions of sites. Behind each of them is the human destiny of the owner. Some sites are legally blocked, but a huge number of them are groundless.

The court - the most effective way to combat Roskomnadzor lawlessness.

An administrative lawsuit is written five minutes. In it, you should only indicate that your constitutional right to disseminate information has been violated, attach a copy of the notice of registration in the unified register and request the court to request the registrar of your domain name to know who owns it. State duty of 300 rubles and the car spun.

You probably won't win the trial, but Roskomnadzor will put Roskomnadzor on the floor 100 times a day. For each claim, you need to prepare documents for the court, you need to write an objection, you need to look for a representative. This is a lot of time. No one is so easy for a department to give billions to additional lawyers, let alone the costs of a judicial department.

Zadovos zharovskuyu car is very simple. You just need not whining, and get up and do.

PS At the request of the administration, the title of the article was changed, and I spread the link to the mentioned court decision of May 17, 2016 .
Also a sample of an administrative claim . The registrar's certificate is optional, the details for paying the state duty are on the website of your district court.