INTERVIEW: Official says govt to control Runet if stability threatened

MOSCOW, Feb 12 (PRIME) -- Centralized control over the Runet, the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, will be introduced only if there is a threat to its stability, Andrei Klishas, chairman of the constitutional law committee at the Federation Council, the parliament’s upper house, told PRIME in an interview on Tuesday.

“The response measures include coordination of activities of connection operators, infrastructure owners and Internet companies to prevent threats and liquidate their consequences,” Klishas said.

The senator is one of the authors of a bill on sustainable functioning of the Runet, which the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, will consider on Tuesday in the first out of three mandatory readings.

An exhaustive list of threats to the country’s information security will be drawn during drills of the state authorities, connection operators, and owners of technological networks.

Klishas said that measures will depend on the type of threat, and a list of measures should be stipulated in by-laws.

The bill intends to authorize the communications service to control the public connection network in the face of a threat to the Runet’s integrity, sustainability or security and take measures to neutralize such threats.

The Audit Chamber earlier said that the bill could raise the price of goods and services, which implies a risk of higher expenses of budgets of all levels.

Klishas said, “Spending of connection operators will be lower because of redistribution of functions on blocking access to banned information.”

Financing of equipment for the purpose is already stipulated in the federal budget and in the Information Security program of national project Digital Economy, the senator told PRIME.

There are risks of worsening of Internet traffic in the country after adoption of the bill. “If we compare the risks related to the possible worsening of technological capacities of connection operators and the consequences of restrictions on work of the Internet in Russia from the outside, the latter weigh much more. At that, certainly, risks of worsening of the traffic quality should be minimized,” Klishas said.

Government criticism and suggestions to the bill could be taken into consideration when preparing the document for the State Duma’s second reading, he said.

“The level of infiltration of information technologies into all spheres of life is high. We cannot be sure about confidentiality of information in data exchange in personal correspondence. Third parties can obtain access to the information we exchange by e-mail,” Klishas said.

The country’s information society strategy defines the main ways of data protection, including processing data between Russians on local data exchange servers and transferring such data on the country’s territory via networks of local operators, the senator said.

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