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More claims over Russian telecom watchdog’s blockings expected in coming week - lawyer

Alexandr Zharov, chief of the media watchdog, said earlier that 18 Google and Amazon subnetworks had been placed on the list of prohibited websites

© Kirill Kukhmar/TASS

MOSCOW, May 1. /TASS/. Head of the International Human Rights Group Agora Pavel Chikov expects more claims over blockings of Russia’s telecom and media watchdog, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, to be filed this week.

"This week will see claims to Roskomnadzor. Among media outlets only there are around ten those aggrieved (including well-recognized)," Chikov wrote on his Telegram channel.

Earlier reports said that Chief Executive of Investory company Alexander Vikharev was the first entrepreneur to file a 5 mln rubles ($80.7 mln) claim against the regulator after his company’s website fell under a large-scale blocking initiated by the Service against Telegram.

Alexandr Zharov, chief of the media watchdog, said earlier that 18 Google and Amazon subnetworks had been placed on the list of prohibited websites. According to Zharov, the federal service informed the companies about a significant amount of soon-to-be-blocked IP addresses stored in their cloud services.

On April 13, Moscow’s Tagansky court blocked access to the cloud-based instant messaging service, Telegram, in Russia over its failure to provide encryption keys to the Federal Security Service, the FSB. The court satisfied the lawsuit by Russia’s telecom watchdog filed on April 6. Telegram said those demands would be impossible to implement since the keys were stored on users’ devices.

In July 2017, the FSB demanded that Telegram provide the keys to decrypt user messages citing its own administrative order, which established the procedure for providing the encryption keys. Telegram’s top officials said that this requirement was impossible to meet technically and tried to challenge it in several court battles, but to no avail. On March 20, 2018, Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the company’s lawsuit. After the court ruling, the Russian watchdog said the messaging service had 15 days to provide the required information to the country’s security agencies.

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