Well, that's just sad. GitHub just became a hostage of Russian authorities.
Roskomnadzor (RKN) is an organ directly controlled by Government of Russian Federation. Its decisions are "autonomous" in a sense they do not depend on decisions of a court. They - or their supervisors - can freely decide what information in the web is legal and what is not, on the basis of the Federal Law of July 27, 2006 № 149-FZ "On Information, Information Technology and Information Security".
The law broadly defines exactly three areas of harmful and therefore illegal content:
- child porn;
- info on makng narcotics;
- descriptions of methods of commiting suicide.
Today, they decided to make a stand on a case of suicide.txt - a copypasta older than the web itself, which is, although it technically falls into point 3 of above, is harmless to anyone but an unprepared 9th-grader who might just die of laughter reading it. The very same file first fell into RKN's sight two months ago, allowing them to suddenly disrupt the workflow of hundreds of Russian IT companies and tens of thousands of their employees and freelancers. That time RKN backed off under a huge backlash of disgruntled community and unblocked the site within hours. This time it looks like they had to prove a point.
Mr Ksenzov, the head ass of RKN, played naivete, defending RKN's actions by avoiding questions and countering them with his own questions like "how many programmers are actually using GH here? Why aren't they making a Russian resource instead?". He never said who were the "experts" who decided that a suggestion to "put two pencils into nostrils and smash your head against a hard surface" can be considered anything but an example of lethally bad humor. He remained deaf to hundreds of real people arguing with him on Twitter and Facebook, which by some incredible feat remain unblocked in Russia despite numerous calls to Mr. Ksenzov to "go kill himself" - which is a direct violation of aforementioned Federal Law of July 27, 2006 № 149-FZ.
Mr Ksenzov was determined to prove: censorship in Russia is a thing.
Unlike broad definitions of Federal Law of July 27, 2006 № 149-FZ, the Constitution of Russian Federation is terse and succint. Here's the part of article 29, point 5, regarding censorship, in its entirety:
Цензура запрещается.
Which simply means "Censorship is forbidden". And that's it. Nothing else. Just two words. In fact, the alphabetical index on http://www.constitution.ru/ - the official website of Russian Constitution - doesn't even include "Censorship", because that's the only thing that can be said about it. Censorship is fucking forbidden!
Russian IT remains one of the last communities where policies installed by current Russian government are widely and strongly critisized. By following RPN's orders, GitHub harms the Russian IT community - and other Russians - more than when RPN blocks the service. This precedent allows RPN to gain fake legitimacy points and lets it further dictate its decisions around the web - directly by blacklisting sites, and indirectly by creating a threat to take down any content. Monetary and temporal losses from not being able to access the code and documentation of a huge GH community, or even your own code, are nothing compared from loss of freedoms.
While I personally understand the business decision to comply with the non-constitutional law in order to avoid further losses, and would not suggest doing otherwise, I am still deeply saddened. I also understand that by choosing such an extravagant way of saying "fuck you" to president Putin, which he won't hear, I probably created a ton of unnecessary work for GitHub's legal and technical departments. Sorry for that, guys.
This case, although it directly concerns tens of thousands of people, and indirectly much more, will not be shown on TV, neither Russian, nor US. Discussions on Reddit will be buried within days. Recurrent takedown notices from RPN will not even spark any attention, and the case will be completely forgotten.
Iran is beheading a guy for a Facebook post. I will probably get on some kind of list at worst. I guess I'm lucky!
In my opinion Roskomnadzor just use this case as a reason to a total internet censorship at Russia Federation. They don't care about children who may read the "dangerous" content. They just want to legitimize censorship and cover it under "children protection" facade.
There are some content to be banned for free access. But the situation when one government institution without any discussion and without any desire to listen to the people bans the content is totally unacceptable.
Roskomnadzor has to explain it's actions to a GitHub community. Otherwise it's requests should be considered illegal and dangerous for basic human rights.