Update June 7 – According to media reports, Yandex and the authorities reached an agreement on how to apply the legislation as for providing law enforcement bodies with access to encrypted user content.
Yandex, the Russian digital giant, received a request from Russian secret service, the FSB, to grant them access to encrypted user content from the company’s data storage and webmail services (‘Yandex.Disk’ and ‘Yandex.Pochta’). The request was received “a few months ago,” Russian business daily RBC reported today, citing an unnamed source close to the company.
Yandex has not handled the encryption keys over to the FSB so far. While acknowledging that the related legislation applies to all email services, messengers and social networks, Yandex argues that, technically, the FSB’s demand goes beyond what it is entitled to receive.
“The law speaks to the transfer of information that is ‘necessary for decoding messages.’ It does not imply a demand for transferring keys capable of decoding all traffic,” says a company statement cited by online publication Meduza.
“The goal of the law is to observe security standards, and we completely share [the FSB’s] belief in the importance of that goal. However, law enforcement is possible without violating the privacy of user data,” Yandex underlines. “We believe it is important to observe a balance between security and user privacy and to consider the principle of equally applied regulation for all sectors of the market,” the NASDAQ-listed company concludes.
Online dating aficionados on secret service radars?
Meanwhile, as reported by NGO Roskomsvoboda, the Russian Internet regulator Roskomnadzor has just added the dating app Tinder to its list of “information-dissemination organizers.”
To meet the authorities’ request, Tinder should store all user correspondence for six months and make the data available to Russian law enforcement authorities upon request.
Adopted in 2016, a new Russian legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) requires messenger apps and other “organizers of information distribution” to allow the FSB to decipher user messages and other content.
Some 175 different websites and online services are listed by Roskomnadzor’s list of “organizers of information distribution.”
The Telegram challenge
Among them Telegram, which did agree to register its service in Russia but refused to cooperate with the secret service under “laws incompatible with Telegram’s privacy policy.” As a consequence, last year, a Moscow court ruled to block access to Telegram in a trial which the messenger’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov called “an open farce.”
The authorities’ failed attempts to block access to the service in Russia caused substantial damages to a number of online services which saw their IP address blocked even though they had no relation to Telegram.
One year after these events, the popular instant messenger continues to be widely accessible from Russia, and seems growingly popular.
Featured picture inspired by Roskomsvoboda artwork
