An international conference on cyber security opens in London on Tuesday. This is the first forum to be held on such a high level. High-ranking representatives of 80 countries, including Russia, will take part in its work. Minister of Communication Igor Shchegolev will lead the Russian delegation.
The conference is sure to become an arena of tough confrontation between Russia and China, on the one hand, and the leading Western countries, on the other, Kommersant writes. According to its information, the Russian delegation will insist that the rules of conduct in the Internet should be adopted on the U.N. level. Besides, it will promote the Convention on Information Security, drafted by the Russian Security Council and Foreign Ministry. The American and British delegations will do their best for blocking the Russian initiative.
Moscow’s reserved attitude to the British initiative was brought about from the very beginning by the fact that Russian experts (from the Foreign Ministry and the Security Council) were working out their own model of regulating the Internet, and believed that their participation in the London summit would be regarded as Moscow’s recognition of the priority importance of the Western idea of information security. In the long run, Moscow decided not to ignore the British initiative, but to act first. In September Russia made public two conceptions of the norms of conduct in the cyber space – the short and the long ones.
On September 12 official representatives of Russia, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan at the UN submitted a joint project on the rules of conduct in the sphere of ensuring international information security at the 66th session of the U.N. General Assembly. The authors of the three-page document urged to fight the circulation of information, which inspires terrorism, separatism and extremism, or undermines political, economic and social stability in other countries.
On September 22, at a special meeting in Yekaterinburg, the heads of security services and law enforcement agencies of 52 countries were shown a U.N. conceptual draft convention, entitled “On ensuring international information security.” The 18-page document specified norms of the regulation of the Internet, taking into consideration military-political, criminal and terrorist challenges and threats. It bans the use of the Internet for military purposes and for the purpose of overthrowing regimes in other countries, but gives much freedom of action to the authorities inside the national segments of the Internet.
“We fired the first shot and actually snatched the initiative from the Western countries. Only the rules, suggested by our countries, are being discussed all over the world. The Britons had to change the programme of the conference,” a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry told Kommersant with pride.