On amendments to the federal law "On information, information technology and information protection". This document, in fact, proposes to prohibit anonymity in messengers, introducing the mandatory identification of the user by the telecom operator.
Ban on anonymous
According to the explanatory note to the document, this bill is intended to regulate the activities of the organizers of the exchange of electronic messages, that is, instant messengers.
"The draft law defines the concept of an instant messaging organizer and imposes on this subject the obligation to ensure the transmission of electronic messages only to those Internet users who are identified in the manner established," the text of the draft says.
Thus, a user who is not identified according to all the rules will not be able to use the services of the messenger and exchange messages.
User identification must be carried out by telecom operators based on the number mobile phone under an agreement concluded with the organizer of the exchange of electronic messages.
In addition, messengers must provide the user with a technical opportunity to refuse to receive messages from another user, as well as be ready to provide mass mailing at the initiative of government authorities. Also, the bill separately spelled out the obligation to ensure the confidentiality of transmitted electronic messages.
The organizer of the exchange of electronic messages is obliged to restrict the sending and transmission of messages containing information, the distribution of which is contrary to the laws of the country. As told Interfax one of the authors of the project, such information includes, for example, a call to participate in unauthorized street protests.
If the messenger refuses to comply with the requirements of the authorized federal executive body, it may face blocking on the territory of the Russian Federation. In addition, in parallel, bill on administrative fines for failure to fulfill duties: 3-5 thousand rubles. - for individuals, 30-50 thousand rubles. - for officials and from 800 thousand to 1 million rubles. - for legal entities.
Both laws are expected to enter into force on January 1, 2018, by which time the organizers of e-mail exchanges are obliged to bring their activities in line with the requirements set out in the legal document.
The press service of the Media Communication Union (MKS) "Gazeta.Ru" was told that
the need for a draft law on the regulation of instant messengers is caused by the existence of legal relations outside the framework of Russian legislation, which also includes communication in messengers.
For users of such services, there are no tools to protect their rights, for example, in the case of receiving threats in messengers or mailings that the user did not subscribe to. With the introduction of instant messengers into the legal field, users can finally expect that their rights will be respected.
The introduced bill as a whole is based on those expert developments that the ISS proposed, and was finalized by the deputies, taking into account the additions and recommendations of industry regulators.
"De facto, most messengers already use a subscriber number when identifying a subscriber, and he will not be required to take any additional actions when the law enters into force," the ISS explained.
The PR-director also confirmed to Gazeta.Ru that
most instant messengers already ask for a phone number during registration, so the State Duma is essentially “formalizing what already exists”.
“The bottom line is that the country has certain legislation in the field of communications. But the world is changing, new forms of communication are appearing, which must be brought under the existing laws, ”Lidov explained.
The law will only affect ARI
The law, if adopted, will apply only to those messengers that are in the register of information dissemination organizers (ORI), formed by Roskomnadzor. At the time of the release of the note, there are 81 resources in the ORI list, including services, VKontakte and some others.
The main part of the list consists exclusively of Russian websites, but in the spring of 2017, the Swiss messenger Threema appeared in it, which supposedly has increased personal data security thanks to end-to-end encryption.
In early May, Roskomnadzor blocked the well-known Chinese messenger WeChat in Russia, adding it to the register of prohibited resources. A few days later, the owners of the messenger provided the data requested by the supervisory authority, and access to it was restored.
The popular Russian messengers Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger are not yet in this register of organizers of information dissemination. The spokesman previously declined to disclose whether the agency had contacted these companies with a request to provide data for inclusion in the ARI list.
Georgy Mosalov, Anastasia Rumyantseva, Polina Poletaeva
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a government decree on the rules for registration in messengers. Now services will be required to verify user data with the databases of mobile operators. Thus, only the person for whom the phone number is registered can use the application. Experts are confident that such measures will allow the authorities to prevent the commission of illegal actions using anonymous accounts in instant messengers. At the same time, this decree will not affect the activities of the services themselves and the convenience of their customers, experts are convinced.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree on the rules for registering users in instant messengers by phone number. The document was published on the portal of legal information. It will enter into force in 180 days - May 5, 2019.
According to the text of the legal act, the messenger is obliged to confirm the data on the user's number by sending a request to the appropriate cellular operator, which, within 20 minutes after the request, must confirm or deny the presence of the user in its databases.
If the presence of the user in the subscriber bases is confirmed, the cellular company is obliged to enter information about the messenger and a unique identification code that was assigned to the user by the application in its database. In this case, already registered users will also have to go through authorization.
“In case of non-receipt of information from the operator within the prescribed period ... or receipt of information about the absence of information about the subscriber in the databases, identification is considered unsuccessful,” the legislative act emphasizes.
Upon termination of the contract with the subscriber, the operator is obliged to notify those messengers in which the user was registered within 24 hours. The application will then need to run the re-identification process.
- RIA News
Previously, to register in the messenger, it was enough just to download the application and enter the code sent in the SMS message, reminded the head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov. He stressed that in this case it was possible to register for any number, including someone else's.
“The possibility of anonymous communication in messengers makes it difficult for law enforcement agencies to investigate crimes. The current government decree is a necessary step towards creating a safe communication environment for both citizens and the state as a whole, ”Izvestia quotes Zharov.
The head of Roskomnadzor clarified that the owners of messengers are subject to administrative liability for violating the new resolution, but did not explain what it would be.
"The state must have levers of influence"
The state seeks to regulate the use of instant messengers, since with their help "coordination of illegal actions" is often carried out, said Alexander Yushchenko, deputy chairman of the State Duma committee on information policy, information technology and communications, in an interview with RT.
“Either this is trade or the dissemination of prohibited information. Phenomena such as, for example, extremism, which is also spread in instant messengers, have an extremely negative effect on fragile young minds. The state should have some leverage to influence or prevent this, ”he said.
Thus, according to the FSB, 25 terrorist attacks were prevented in Russia in 2017, while the terrorists managed to carry out four attacks. Moreover, all terrorist attacks, according to the ministry, were coordinated, including from the territory of Syria.
The new law solves the problem of comparing a messenger user with a real person, says Otkrytie Broker analyst Timur Nigmatullin.
“If a crime occurs using social networks, for example, someone published illegal information on the VKontakte network, you can formally link an account with a specific person ... In messengers, this cannot be done yet,” he said in a conversation with RT.
At the same time, the decree will not significantly affect the activities of messengers, security expert Alexander Vlasov is convinced.
"This will not affect the work of instant messengers in any way, because the very same WhatsApp and Viber must first inform themselves that the user is obliged to log in only to the number with which he is registered," Vlasov said in an interview with RT.
"Nothing will change for users"
Law-abiding users will also not notice changes when using applications, Arseniy Shcheltsin, an expert on the digital economy, is convinced.
“As for users, I don’t think it will affect them in any way. I mean ordinary users who do not go beyond the law, do not distribute illegal content and do not carry out illegal activities, creating extremist pages, groups and dialogues ... The main task of the decree is to proactively analyze the page and determine its link to a person, ”he stressed in a conversation with RT.
The fact that there will be no changes for users, said RT in the press service of Megafon. The company also noted that it is ready to execute the order.
“We are ready to implement the government’s decree, as it was adopted in pursuance of the law that came into force. In fact, it introduces already existing de facto relationships into a legal channel, when users of instant messengers are identified by their phone number. Nothing will change for users, "the press service of Megafon added.
However, this regulation can create some problems for users. This was told to RT by the former partner of Pavel Durov in social network VKontakte Anton Rosenberg.
“Nobody wants to wait 20 minutes for registration. By no means all users are, in principle, ready to indicate their first and last names, not to mention the full names, and judging by the text, when indicating, for example, Vanya instead of Ivan, registration should be refused, ”he.
Rosenberg also pointed out that illegal citizens will be able to bypass the new norm by registering an account in the messenger on a SIM card of another country.
Recall that now the activities of messengers are regulated by amendments to the law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection", which came into force on January 1, 2018. The rule of registration using a code in an SMS message, for example, is provided for by this particular legal act.
Also, instant messengers are obliged to provide users with the opportunity to refuse to receive messages from other subscribers, to restrict the dissemination of illegal information and to allow government agencies to send mass messages.
The bill prohibits messengers from working with unidentified "in the prescribed manner" users. A messenger that does not follow the law will be blocked. For clarification, we turned to Oleg Nikolaev, a deputy of the State Duma, who participated in the preparation of the document (the "Fair Russia" faction, a member of the State Duma committee on economic policy, industry, innovative development and entrepreneurship).
On the purposes of the law
The first is to separate messengers into a separate segment and adjust it. Now the area is not regulated, which is why prohibited content circulates in it and, at the same time, a huge flow of information.
The second is to establish interaction between market participants in the segment and government agencies. So that the service provider can register and identify himself.
The third is to make sure that the users of messengers are real people who can be identified, and not bots.
The fourth is the opportunity to convey to people official information from government agencies, and in the event of an emergency - to contact the person, warn or find him.
Messengers are increasingly used in terrorist attacks. Partly also because there is an uncontrolled spread of information in the unregulated segment. And in order not to deprive people of the opportunity to use useful resources, but also to prevent use for illegal purposes and block dubious sources, legislative regulation is needed.
"Identification in the prescribed manner"
This means that the [messenger] service and the user are identified. The service is registered with Roskomnadzor (the bill, if adopted, will affect messengers registered with Roskomnadzor - ed.). The user is identified as a subscriber who bought and issued a SIM card according to the rules.
How will blocking happen
Exactly the same as sites are blocked. And it will be temporary - as soon as the conditions are met, the block is removed.
How the change will affect users
No way. Conscientious operators of messengers have nothing to fear, and conscientious users too. Nobody will notice changes in work, just as we do not notice the same regulation of SMS or calls.
The regulation will allow the telecom operator to block dubious content and prevent uncontrolled distribution of information.
If the market is organized, users will be able to receive centralized newsletters. This is an emergency notification system or weather warnings, like those sent by the Ministry of Emergencies via SMS. Or, for example, recently there were problems with Megafon, and some messengers were working - it would be possible to send a mailing list.
About anonymity
The government definitely doesn't want to access the correspondence. It wants to limit the spread of unverified, dangerous and extremist information. Messengers will be subject to the same laws on the protection of personal information and correspondence. This is also spelled out in the bill.
On the readiness of the law
The law needs further elaboration. The content will be supplemented taking into account the opinions of market players. There will be a round table on this topic, maybe two. The law will go through several readings. Consideration and adoption will try to carry out during the spring session, that is, until the end of July.
Evgeny Chereshnev, CEO Biolink.Tech
The law banning anonymity in messengers is, firstly, the height of technological incompetence: the people who proposed it have no idea how Internet identification and authorization technologies work - the phone number has long been a rudiment and is absent in many messengers as a class - none of the commercial players in their right mind will change their business models in order to program a "crutch" into their product to please the government of one particular country, thereby significantly increasing their workload on product development and support.
Secondly, the true motive of this law is unclear - the reference of the Chairman of the State Duma on Information Policy Leonid Levin to the benefit of the draft law in limiting the actions of criminals is rather a cover for masking actions aimed at justifying the expansion of state control over freedom of private life.
Prohibition of convenient methods of authorization and identification will not lead to anything in terms of finding criminals. There are technologies open source (open source) - anyone, including a criminal, can assemble their own messenger in a matter of hours on their knees and communicate with anyone in encrypted form and without being tied to a phone number. They, in fact, do this.
In addition, I can not help but draw attention to one fact that does not fit with the above motive: the deputies propose to oblige messengers to provide selective blocking of messages and vice versa - “green light” messages sent at the initiative of state authorities.
We are offered to go back in time and in Russia again start managing the settings of advanced services by hand. That is, what the deputies are proposing and what Mr. Levin considers positive contradicts what Vladimir Putin is talking about, demanding that Russia move towards a digital economy. I think this is extremely strange and ill-considered.
Let's first learn how to build good roads throughout the country, and then we will deal with Internet regulation. During this time, just the specialists of the required level will grow up.
So far, even the basic technological expertise for legislators, alas, is not enough and we get such strange initiatives. The new law, in fact, says that every Internet user is obliged to have a telephone registered for a Russian passport. And this is an alarming sign.
It turns out that if a precedent is created - if one application is obliged to let people in only with a passport (in fact, this is so - this is the law) - then everyone else can be forced further. Passport internet is the first route to digital slavery. I am sure that this approach is sickening to all reasonable residents of Russia. Personally, I am against this law for this reason.
What will happen to Telegram? Nothing bad will happen. Telegram is already using a phone number to authorize a user in its service. You can bind any number, including buying any IP-telephony number on the Internet and chatting peacefully.
The fact is that in Telegram, encryption works separately from identification - roughly speaking, the state at best can see that two people are communicating, but cannot see what - since all correspondence is encrypted with public key algorithms - it is not no one can read it, not even the creators of Telegram. The technology of this type of encryption is not a monopoly of Durov - although I have great respect for him. This is how many popular instant messengers work.
And the law here should not rebel against the universe, but, on the contrary, help - make encryption of private correspondence a freedom protected by the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
Petr Lidov, PR-director of Megafon
The State Duma's motivation [in considering the bill] is clear. Such regulation of messengers should have happened sooner or later, since they replaced other types of communication, but they are dropped from the regulatory measures. It makes sense to regulate messengers for security reasons. Restricting spam mailings, for example, extremist messages, is a normal measure.
There is also a second point: if your SMS correspondence falls into someone's hands, there will be persons who can be prosecuted by law for information leakage. And with information leakage from instant messengers, you won't attract anyone. This is a consumer control issue.
Mobile operators will not get financial benefits from this - such an idea (to make money on messengers) would have been appropriate at the dawn of the emergence of technology. Our revenue is based on mobile internet traffic. And no one plans to bring all users back into calls and SMS. Here, rather, we will adjust. But the costs of messenger operators are likely to increase in the production of applications. As for the anonymity of correspondence, the same legislation works here as in the case of SMS and calls.
Dmitry Ogorodnikov, Director of the Competence Center for Information Security at Technoserv
The fact that it is necessary to establish the identity of the user by the mobile number and by agreement of the telecom operator is questioned. Experts believe that this bill is useless. If necessary, it is possible to identify the user by IP-address and subscription agreement. The contract contains passport data and copies of documents. This project does not even reflect the timing and registration of user data. It is quite clear that the law has not been worked out. If we take, for example, the jurisdiction of other countries, then the share of Russian users in WhatsApp is about 2% of the billion audience. Nobody will try to tidy up the data. This means that apart from the new bureaucratic problem, there are no plans at all to simplify the use of messengers.
MOSCOW, June 14 - RIA Novosti. The bill on the regulation of the work of instant messengers passed the first reading in the State Duma. The document prohibiting anonymity in instant messaging services was supported by 356 deputies, two opposed, one abstained.
The bill providing for amendments to the law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection" was submitted to the lower house of parliament at the end of May by deputies from three factions: Marina Mukabenova (United Russia), Oleg Nikolaev (Fair Russia) and Alexander Yushchenko (KPRF).
The document obliges the organizers of instant messaging to ensure the transmission of messages only to those users who are identified in accordance with the law. To this end, the authors of the bill propose to assign identification numbers to subscribers on the basis of contracts that messengers will have to conclude with telecom operators.
In addition, the organizers of messaging are supposed to be obliged to provide users with a technical opportunity to refuse to receive messages from other users, as well as to ensure the possibility of sending messages on the initiative of government agencies.
It should also be possible to restrict the distribution and transmission of messages with data that violate Russian law. If these requirements are not met, the telecom operator may restrict access to the messenger by the decision of the authorized body and on the basis of a court decision.
Subscriber identification
The adoption of the bill completes the cycle of forming a subscriber identification system, said the head of the Committee on Information Policy Leonid Levin.
Opinion: there is no place for people "in balaclavas" on the InternetThe State Duma has received a bill amending the work of instant messengers on the territory of the Russian Federation. Expert Andrei Masalovich on the air of radio Sputnik expressed the opinion that the essence of the initiative of the deputies is correct, but concrete ways of its implementation still need to be discussed."Since today the volume of information transmitted through instant messengers has already exceeded the volume of information transmitted by traditional telecom operators, and also due to the fact that the owners have not proposed any measures to regulate their activities on their own, it was decided to support this bill," he said speaking at the plenary session.
"At the same time, messengers remain outside the legal field. In fact, the legality of the messenger's work depends on the arbitrary decisions of its owners," the deputy said.
At the same time, according to him, some provisions of the bill need to be adjusted. So, by the second reading, the deputies intend, in particular, to clarify the concept of an instant messaging service, as well as to prescribe the obligation of their organizers to make mass mailings at the initiative of state authorities.
He drew attention to the fact that even in the USA there are no use codes for the WhatsApp messenger. "Because the so-called RSA algorithm is used. This is a mathematical model, until no one has cracked it. A person who once opens this model will receive a Nobel Prize. And we are talking about Roskomnadzor blocking something," - the deputy considers.
He explained his idea on the example of an apartment building, where everyone uses a Wi-Fi telephone connection and a huge stream of encrypted communication goes to the IP address. “Roskomndazor will simply have no idea what is encrypted there, it will never determine where the client is identified, and where the client is unidentified. The same WhatsApp, which is located somewhere in California, will never understand this ... That is, the vulnerability of this algorithm has not yet been discovered, which means that it is also impossible to break the codes, "Lugovoi stressed.
In general, according to the parliamentarian, "it resembles such a war with Pokémon."
