Under the hood. The bill on total Russian wiretapping passed in first reading

    The State Duma of the Russian Federation today adopted in its first reading an “anti-terrorism” package of bills . Among them is an amendment to the Law on Communication, in paragraph 1 of Art. 64: “Telecom operators are obliged to store information on the facts of reception, transmission, delivery and / or processing of voice information and text messages, including their content, as well as images, sounds or other messages of users of communication services in the Russian Federation for three years” .

    287 deputies voted for, 7 people voted against, in total 294 deputies out of 450 voted.

    Earlier, mobile operators and the Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation criticized the package of amendments . The Council found in the draft laws under review a number of rules that unreasonably expand the scope of criminal law.

    Experts expressed the view that the proposed changes to Art. 186-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure constitutes an unprecedented attempt on the privacy of citizens: “The duty of a service provider (for example, an e-mail service) to keep the contents of communication implies that this storage should be carried out regardless of the will of the communication participant, for example, its intention to delete this communication (for example, a letter) from the server ... The accumulation and storage of vast amounts of information about each communication case for three years means that they cannot be reliably protected us from all sorts of abduction intruders. As we have repeatedly seen, this risk exists even in the work of the most responsible organizations. In this case, it will be about many thousands of telecom operators. In this way,

    However, by the second reading, bills should be amended. The government, in its official recall, supported its adoption on the condition that the amount of information stored by telecom operators should be reduced “taking into account the technical capabilities of telecom operators and organizers of information dissemination”.

    The expert working group "Communication and Information Technologies" under the Russian government also criticized the "anti-terrorism project" of amendments to State Duma deputies, assessing the costs of operators for storing data at 5.2 trillion rubles , "which is the third part of the RF budget," the document says.

    Representatives of telecom operators expressed that the bill does not take into account the technical capabilities of telecom operators. A representative of VimpelCom said that “operators have no opportunity to maintain or develop services, the deterioration of which will immediately be felt by customers.” That is, we are talking about a cardinal increase in tariffs for mobile communications and the Internet.

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