Yesterday Oleg Fomichev, Russia’s Deputy Minister for Economic Development, stated that the data storage infrastructure needed to implement Russia’s new “anti-terrorist” legislation does not exist currently.
“This kind of equipment doesn’t exist anywhere in the world in such a quantity at the moment,” the Interfax news agency quoted his as saying, as reported by The Moscow Times.
It is “very difficult to say” what timescale would be needed to have the required infrastructure in place, he conceded.
President Putin, who signed the legislation last week, called on Russian companies to be given the task of producing the required systems “as quickly as possible,” in line with Russia’s import substitution strategy.
Ilya Massukh, head of the Internet Sovereignty section of the presidential administration, said that Russia indeed had enough manufacturers capable of supplying the needed equipment. “Kraftway produces data storage equipment,” Russian business daily Vedomosti quoted him as saying, “as does Aquarius, the National Computer Corporation, T-Platforms [and state corporation] Rostec.”
The official offered assurances that the government would conduct an open transparent selection process.
According to him, the creation of a system capable of storing that much data will cost tens of billions of rubles (10 billion rubles = $160 million at the current exchange rate). This amount does not include the storage of video data – which Massukh hopes the authorities will not require, as reported by The Moscow Times.
Under the controversial new legislation, which will come into force in 2018, Internet and telecom players are required to store the content and the metadata of all their users’ communications for a significant period of time. The legislation also aims to provide the FSB, Russia’s secret service, with transparent access to all these messages, even encrypted ones.
This new legislation will entail huge costs for operators, in the range of several dozens of billion US dollars for mobile operators alone, according them. But many experts doubt the legislation can ever be applied in its current version.
