The issue of blocking internet resources is back at the top of the news: RuTracker has been blocked, Russia’s internet censor is once again threatening Twitter, and overall it feels like we’re in for another wave of idiotic bans.
But my news is exactly the opposite: we managed to unblock my LiveJournal, which had been blocked a year and a half ago and seemed lost for good.
I’m sharing the experience because, unfortunately, a lot of people may find it useful.
So.
On March 13, 2014, the Prosecutor General’s Office issued an order to restrict access to online resources, on the basis of which access to my LiveJournal was blocked.
Under the law, such an order is supposed to contain specific information about why the blog is being blocked.
That is necessary so the owner of the resource can quickly remove the information from the page and notify Roskomnadzor (Russia’s media and internet regulator), which is then supposed to restore access.
But in my case, the authorities’ goal was exactly the opposite—to block my LiveJournal in such a way that I would be unable to unblock it. So the prosecutor’s office did not specify anything concrete in its order and instead decided to block the entire blog, because apparently any information from Navalny was presumed illegal by definition.
This is how it was worded: “A significant portion of the posted materials contains calls for citizens to participate in mass events that have not been approved in accordance with the established procedure by executive authorities and local self-government bodies.”
So of course we ran to court shouting, “The law is entirely on our side.”
But, as usual, the law was on our side, while the judges were on theirs. In elaborate legal language, the court wrote that publishing information from Navalny was prohibited and that he could be blocked entirely, despite the legal requirement to identify the specific prohibited information:
Just to be sure, we asked Roskomnadzor exactly what information had to be removed for the blog to start working again.
And here even Roskomnadzor says outright that it does not know what information needs to be deleted in order to restore access. It also adds that Navalny not only disseminates information but also attracts new supporters to it—as if that were any concern of Roskomnadzor’s:
In that situation, we concluded that the only way to restore access to the LiveJournal was to remove all posts.
After that, we assured everyone, including the LiveJournal administration, that the prohibited information had been taken down.
After that, access to the LiveJournal was restored. Now we’ll be gradually bringing back the old posts and regularly asking the crooks at the prosecutor’s office: how about this one? No violations here?
It took a) 1.5 years of court proceedings and correspondence, and b) the temporary removal of all content, for access to be restored.
So in the end, we still do not know—and no official body can say for sure—why what was at the time the most popular blog in Russia was blocked for 1.5 years.
Maybe the author just has the wrong last name.
Many thanks for the painstaking legal work on the blog to our super-lawyers Ivan “Avanes” Zhdanov and Yevgeny “Hellbeard” Zamyatin.