The agency has announced a contest for designs for software that would automatically monitor online media and locate signs of violations of federal legislation that prohibits extremism. The contest deadline is August 15, 2011, with a second deadline of December 15, 2011 for testing and bug fixes.

Officials estimated the cost of the system at 15 million rubles – about half a million USD.

Roskomnadzor hopes to use the system to monitor materials posted on internet media websites issuing public calls to commit acts of terrorism, justifying terrorism, demonstrating Nazi symbols or attributes, calling for the violent overthrow of constitutional order, violating the “unity of Russia,” or inciting social, racial, national, or religious strife.

The system would also monitor public accusations against civil servants of having committed crimes.

Officials also want the system to locate “pornography propaganda” and organizations that have been banned by Russian courts, as well as “hidden inserts and other technical means and ways of distributing information that would act on people’s subconscious or have a harmful influence on their health.”

The software will be comprised of a media database, dictionaries of words and expressions that could constitute extremism as defined by Russian law, and “a repository of controversial materials.”

Agency representative Mikhail Vorobyov said Roskomnadzor currently monitors internet media manually with search engines. He noted that the number of registered electronic media outlets is constantly on the rise, topping 5,300 resources today compared to 555 in 2008.

According to Vorobyov, the decision to create an automatic monitoring system was influenced by a June 2010 Supreme Court decision that only requires media outlets to delete or edit “unlawful reader comments” in response to an official request from Roskomnadzor.

Wanton charges of extremism are commonly used by Russian law enforcement agencies to apply pressure to opposition groups that carry out activities deemed undesirable by the state. Federal officials routinely harass protesters, conduct raids of homes and offices, hinder legal forms of protest, and in some cases block opposition websites. Amnesty International has accused federal Russian agencies of using extremism as an excuse to torture criminal suspects.

Following months of legal battles, a Russian court declared in September that a decision by Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media supervision agency) to issue an official warning against the newspaper for “propagandizing nationalistic views” was valid. Since a publication can be shut down after two such warnings, Novaya Gazeta editors say that the court’s decision spells the beginning of the possible end of the newspaper.

In a post on Novaya Gazeta’s blog on Sunday evening, Deputy Chief Editor Sergei Sokolov explained the court case:

It’s entirely possible that next year Novaya Gazeta won’t be found in either kiosks or your mailbox. We may be shut down…

What alarmed the federal officials? The article “Gang, agency, party. Who are the ‘legal nationalists'” – which is research dedicated to ultra-right organizations that openly preach nationalistic views. We quoted propagandistic texts from the web site of Russian Mind, we took photographs from a Nazi website in which people calling themselves legal politicians were covered in symbols that look fascist to the point of confusion. (Notarized copies of these materials were presented to the court.)

Why did we do this? Because Novaya Gazeta has taken a principally antifascist position for the course of many years: it demands that the authorities investigate the activities of nationalist-extremists, it explains to people what the activists from numerous “patriotic” movements that gallivant around the center of Moscow in Russian Marches actually are, it reports statistics on the victims of nationalists. (Several kilograms of these texts were presented to the court.)

In January 2009, fascists murdered our journalist Anastasia Baburova and a friend of our editorial office, lawyer Stanislav Markelov – they were shot in the back of the head in the center of Moscow. It was a public punishment for antifascists. (The court was aware of these circumstances.)

We carried out our own investigation and explained: the people now charged with murder associated with members of Russian Mind and had a certain attitude towards it. Meanwhile, Russian Mind advertises itself as a non-extremist and non-fascist organization. In order for readers and law enforcement agencies to get the proper impression of these citizens, we quoted THEIR program documents and showed THEIR photographs with Nazi symbols. (The court was aware of this.)

We expected that after this publication, Roskomnadzor would deal with the fact that the website of Russian Mind exists, and that prosecutors would begin looking into further criminal charges.

Roskomnadzor did deal with it – only not with the ultra-right, but with Novaya Gazeta.

The offending article can be read in Russian by clicking here.

Translation by theotherrussia.org.

Update 4/6/10: The Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, turned down the State Duma’s bill during it’s Tuesday session. Mihkail Kapura, deputy chairman of the judicial committee, cited a lack of viability to implement such restrictions and the danger of bringing about the destruction of free speech.

A new law passed on Monday by the Russian State Duma will ban the media from reproducing any statements whatsoever issued by anyone deemed to be a terrorist, ITAR-TASS reports.

The bill was written by Robert Shlegel, a member of the leading United Russia party and former press secretary for the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi. It will amend current legislation governing the media to include a ban on “the distribution of any material from persons wanted for or convicted of participating in terrorist activities.”

Shlegel said that the March 29 suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, which killed 40 people and injured more than 100, was the impetus for the bill. He said that he opposes giving a spotlight in the media to Doku Umarov, the Chechen rebel leader who has claimed responsibility for the attacks. He also criticized Google for allowing its YouTube video service to host a recording of Umarov’s post-March 29 statement.

“News about militants should consist only of reports about their destruction,” Shlegel concluded.

Amidst the heightened criticism at the Russian government’s failure to address terrorism originating in the country’s volatile North Caucasus region, some Kremlin supporters have accused the press of being terrorist collaborators. In particular, State Duma Speaker and United Russia member Boris Gryzlov singled out columnist Aleksandr Minkin of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper as collaborating with the terrorists responsible for the March 29 attacks. Minkin has demanded an apology from Gryzlov and threatened to sue him for slander. Gryzlov has threatened a counter suit. Additionally, United Russia member Andrei Isayev has threatened that party members might sue Minkin for being a terrorist collaborator.

Director Oleg Panfilov of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations said that the new law will turn Russia into a country like North Korea and was another example of Shlegel’s “routine stupidity.” “It immediately raises the question,” he said, “Who do we label as terrorists? Those convicted by the court, or those that the bureaucrats consider to be terrorists?”

Secretary Mikhail Fedotov of the Russian Union of Journalists explained that nothing good could result from Russian society being deprived of information about the positions and confessions of alleged terrorists. “Society should know the face of its villains and understand what kind of evil it is being confronted with,” he stressed.

Even without the new law, the Russian media already faces complications with the authorities’ interpretation of current media legislation. Reports surfaced late Monday that the federal communications supervisory agency Roskomnadzor has accused the online edition of the Argumenty Nedeli newspaper of extremism for posting a video of Umarov’s statement. According to the agency, posting the video violates a law prohibiting the media from being used for extremist activity. The law, however, is criticized by oppositionists and human rights groups as being so vague as to allow the government to define extremism however they’d like, and has resulted in crackdowns on a wide variety of groups and individuals critical of the Kremlin.