UPDATE: State Duma approves bill forbidding anonymizers

(Adds ombudsman’s comments in last four paragraphs)

MOSCOW, Jul 21 (PRIME) -- Russia’s State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, has approved the third and final reading of a bill forbidding the use of means of accessing blocked resources, so-called anonymizers, in the country, business daily Vedomosti reported on Friday on its Web site.

The bill seeks to ban information systems and programs to see Internet resources that are restricted on the territory of the country.

Anonymizers must add the resources muted by the local communications services to the blacklist or be blocked themselves.

Internet ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev said he sees the bill as a “fake” one and technically unfeasible.

“(The law) won’t work, because it cannot be implemented technically. It could only result in punishment of certain organizers of information distribution. People will just use other technological solutions, if they need. It looks like a witch-hunt, nothing more,” Marinichev said.

When approving the bill, deputies did not understand how to apply it afterward. “They don’t know what to regulate. They don’t know how to implement. Nobody knows who will apply it. How one can check correctness of work of a virtual personal network (VPN) service? It’ll be difficult to identify the owner. In general, it’s all about nothing, one more ‘fake’ law,” he said.

“The only thing to say for certain is that the law is aimed at threatening own civil society, population of the country. Technologically, it’s nothing.”

End