New legislation signed into law last week by Vladimir Putin strengthens anti-terrorism efforts at the price of civil liberties. The new law allows adolescents as young as 14 to be tried as adults, as well as criminalizes the failure to report a crime, “inducing, recruiting, or otherwise involving” others in civil unrest, and increases the punishment for those convicted of extremism.
Even a brief summary of the law’s contents is chilling. One amendment requires “organizers of information distribution on the Internet,” including messenger apps, social networks, email clients, and even simple websites that encrypt user messages to help the Federal Security Service (FSB) decipher sent messages. Even Edward Snowden, an honored guest of President Putin’s, condemned the law on Twitter as a “Big Brother law.”
The FSB has been given two weeks to find the digital encryption keys needed to monitor digital messaging in Russia.
This dovetails with another portion of the law, which makes publishing incitements to terrorism or expressions of approval for terrorism online a criminal offense. The maximum punishment for public incitement or justification of terrorism is seven years in prison. This is separate from new articles added to the criminal code which ban recruiting others for civil unrest and punish people accused of committing terrorist attacks abroad which kill or injure Russian citizens.
In a piece for the Carnegie Moscow Center, Gleb Bogush, a professor of law at Lomonosov Moscow State University, described how the new law “significantly increases the already stiff penalties” for crimes deemed “extremist actions.” The effect is to create a dangerous dichotomy between what one might call quotidian lawbreaking and extremist actions.
“If these amendments come into force,” Bogush writes, “prison sentences for certain non-violent “extremist” crimes will potentially be twice as long as, for example, murder committed in the heat of passion, which carries a maximum sentence of three years.”
Since the beginning of the Putin era, the Russian government has used the threat of terrorism and the necessity of fighting extremism to justify repressive laws. Bogush notes that because of this, “Russia’s statutory framework can now be effectively used to target not only credible extremist threats, but also political opponents of the state.”
Finding these opponents will be easier than ever under a final portion of the act, which requires that Russian telecom companies store records of all calls and text messages for a period of six months. Furthermore, the companies will need to keep metadata on calls and texts for three years.
It’s a move that would nearly cripple even Russian telecom firms. A representative from MegaFon, the second-largest mobile operator in Russia, told the Wall Street Journal that the cost of equipment and implementation of the law in the first year would be 230 billion rubles ($3.6 billion). This comes as the company reported net profits of around 50 billion rubles in 2015.
Another provider mentioned that prices would likely need to be two to three times higher to cover the cost of compliance and another Snowden tweet called the law a “$33b+ tax on Russia’s internet.” The hit to revenues would also hurt government coffers, which would lose billions of dollars of business income tax revenues.
In response to the complaints, the Kremlin posted a statement calling for “clarifying the stages of implementation of standards that would require significant financial resources.” While this would not be the first time a concerning digital surveillance proposal fell victim to the expenses of compliance, there has so far been little protest against the remainder of the bill.
Under the new law, Russia’s big brother just got much stronger.
