President Vladimir Putin will receive the exclusive right to determine the cases in which the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) can ask operators to block any type of communication on Russian territory. This is evident from the amendments prepared for the second reading of the bill “On Communications”.
In the initial version, it was provided that the grounds for such disconnections were to be established not only by the president, but also by the government, and the measures had to be related to “protecting citizens and the state against security threats”. The amendments to the second reading give the FSB the possibility to transmit to the operators not just “requests”, but mandatory “requirements”, in the cases that will be “established by normative acts of the president”. References to the government and the existence of specific security threats have been removed from the text.
The new wording simplifies the procedure for making decisions on stopping the internet, experts quoted by the “Agentstvo” publication emphasize. The lawyer of the organization OVD-Info, Valeria Vetoškina, states that the limits of application of disconnections are expanding, and the mechanism becomes more centralized, making the execution of orders for telecommunications operators practically inevitable.
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