International digital rights organizations have condemned the legislation.
Amnesty International called the law the “latest blow” in an assault on online freedom.
“The ban on VPNs takes this shameful campaign a whole step further,” a spokesperson for the organization said in a statement. (In 2014, the Russian government passed a law that required foreign companies to store users’ data within the country. LinkedIn was blocked last year for failing to comply.)
Despite this, Amnesty International’s Russian spokesperson Alexander Artemyev, said there hasn’t been much outcry inside Russia.
Speaking via WhatsApp from Moscow, he explained that so far they had not seen “any initiative or counter-action” against the new law.
“There was a protest rally against the new assault on internet freedoms but the attendance was quite low for Moscow, around a few thousand people,” he told BuzzFeed News.
He suggested that activists would be downloading VPNs ahead of the November ban, adding because the law targeted ISPs (so the providers) rather than individual users of VPNs, that could account for the muted response.
“So for those who would like to have their internet browsing protected it becomes only more difficult to obtain needed tech tools,” Artemyev continued, but “difficult doesn’t mean impossible.”
This latest move is a further sign of his intention to clamp down β but is also being seen as a sign of the Kremlin looking out for itself.
Andrei Soldatov, writing in the Moscow Times, notes the FSB (Federal Security Service) will be tasked with enforcing the ban, rather than the internet communications monitor Roskomnadzor.
“This time, itβs not some ordinary threat it is trying to root out, but a threat to ‘national security,’ which is the Kremlinβs euphemism for ‘the stability of the present political regime’,” he writes.
But this being Russia, there are some *notable* exemptions… Members of the Duma will submit an amendment for Russian-occupied Crimea to be exempt, allowing users there to still access and use VPNs, according to Lenta.ru.
