WALL STREET JOURNAL – Aug 22 – As Vladimir Putin's Russia increasingly cracks down on Internet freedoms, a band of self-styled pirates is fighting back. The group of fewer than a dozen lawyers and techies calling themselves Roskomsvoboda (Russian Communications Freedom) has unblocked banned websites, mounted legal cases and recently revealed that Moscow had ordered dating app Tinder to share user information with security services, setting off fresh debate over Moscow's tightening grip on the Internet. Roskomsvoboda's main objective now is to prevent Mr. Putin's government from advancing plans to install a "kill switch" that would allow Russia to firewall itself from the rest of the Internet, much as China does. Russia has banned ~200K sites, and bloggers are now required to register as media, which subjects them to greater government pressure. The new kill switch is scheduled to go live in November.
by Georgi Kantchev
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