Report: Watchdog wants misbehaving anonymizers blocked in 3 days

MOSCOW, Aug 29 (PRIME) -- The Russian communications watchdog has disclosed a draft order of executing the law banning anonymizers and virtual private networks (VPNs), under which the services providing access to banned Web sites could be blocked within three days, business daily Kommersant reported on Tuesday.

The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media will check during a day whether a VPN service connects to banned resources or not. If access is granted, the authority’s officials report to the watchdog’s director or a deputy director who will decide within two days on blocking of the service.

Anonymizers should be connected to the authority’s special system and provide information on their owners, network address to access the system, logins and passwords to the resource.

Director of public project RosKomSvoboda, Artyom Kozlyuk, told business daily Vedomosti that two days to decide on blocking cannot be enough, and the order does not stipulate any communication of the authority with the service. The initiative is applicable only to the services that get connected to the watchdog’s monitoring system, he said.

The law banning anonymizers was approved by the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, in late July. It introduces sanctions for providing access to banned resources. Anonymizers will be revealed by forces of the Federal Security Service and the Interior Ministry. The bulk of the law’s clauses take effect on November 1.

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