Law Repressing Social Media, Bloggers Now In Effect In Russia 167
An anonymous reader writes On Friday, Russia implemented a new law that significantly limits its citizens' online free speech. Under this new law, social media sites must "retain user data for at least six months...within the country's boundaries so it can be available for government inspection." Also, "bloggers with at least 3,000 daily readers must register with Roskomnadzor, the regulator that also oversees Russia's main media outlets." This, of course, means that popular bloggers will no longer be able to remain anonymous.
Easy fix (Score:4, Interesting)
If all the Russian bloggers are just government controlled parrots, just switch to reading foreign blogs.
Also, you could have a setup where your Russian blogger has only a single reader, a foreigner who re-blogs everything they write (unless Russia doesn't take kindly to being clever like this).
freedom OF speech? well, of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:next... (Score:5, Interesting)
Russia's economy is dominated by its energy exports. It can and is largely subsisting on that income.
If you want to break Russia's economy then you need to give europe an alternative energy source.
Controversial as it may be, we should probably be advocating hydrologic fracturing in Eastern Europe. If Ukraine and Poland can ween themselves off Russian energy imports and possibly become net exporters to Germany then Russia's economic position will collapse indifferent to whether or not they censor bloggers.
Re:next... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:next... (Score:3, Interesting)
You live in the world of WTO illusion. Primary resources rich country can pretty much chug along on their own as long as they are patient with catching up. This attitude always leads to outside intervention either through disrupting and fomenting revolution or through direct invasion. The idea being to drive them to borrow illusory capital to buy in mass consumerism products and drive debt in order to strip mine the countries primary resources. Russia is quite simply to powerful to do this hence some constant harassment and prodding is required to drive reaction and then the propaganda campaign can commence.
Don't want to the hassle with data simply point your .ru address to servers in other countries, although it would likely be wise to avoid US servers and servers in other countries controlled by the US.
Why are the Russian getting so uptight about social media servers, easy, the US is right into corrupting social media servers in order to forment social unrest, hence the Russians are hard at work attempting to track that activity down and block it as well as tracking down and deporting US agents. The NSA has a pretty big head start by basically hacking the whole world and the whole world now needing to work hard clean that shit out.
Russia would be better off working on a fairly nasty counter attacking national honey pot network and a massive database flooding and contaminating misinformation campaign, lots and lots of contaminated data, going all over the place, creating false data and data association, massive amounts of it, the idea being to flood the NSA/CIA databases and create false relationships. Tie in some real world actions like minor bank deposits et al and they'll end up chasing reds in everyones beds.
Best defence is a good offence and it is far better than harassing your own population.
Re:the USSR is back (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Soviet's constitution gave the people just one right, it gave more than the US constitution does. That is because the US constiitution does not give or grant rights. It bars government from taking away some of the rights peolle already posess.
This is a pretty important difference.