New provisions of a controversial law on Internet communications came into force on July 1, with a government order requiring Internet companies to store the content and the metadata of all their users’ communications for a significant period of time
Adopted in 2016, this new legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) has entailed huge costs for operators.
Other provisions of the law, which came into force earlier, aim to provide the FSB, Russia’s secret service, with transparent access to all messages, even encrypted ones. Messenger apps and other “organizers of information distribution” have been required to add “additional coding” to transmitted electronic messages so that Russia’s secret service decipher them.
The Russian authorities have made little successful attempts to block access to Telegram, which refused to cooperate with the FSB. The international instant messenger considers the Yarovaya law as being “incompatible with Telegram’s privacy policy.”
Some of the key provisions of Russia’s “Big Brother law” as summarized by Meduza.io
