Comment by andreiw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreiw | Hacker News Reader

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The great thing about guys like you is your astounding hypocrisy, the chutzpah with which you claim authority to represent Russians, and disdain for the "unwashed masses". If literally any other government introduced similar legislation to protect citizen data, it would be considered progressive and relevant to the times we live in. In Russia? "Nasty kremlin bastards". The sheer gall to consider that your own interpretation of anything must be absolute, and that everyone opposed are the "dumb masses". And your ridiculous pandering to the clearly superior western way of life...how could these untermenschen not want to learn English??!

Yeah, do get rid of your citizenship indeed, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Hopefully then you can fully embrace your new homeland and use the time constructively to gripe and moan about whatever future impedance mismatch between reality and your wishful thinking.

As people point out in comments below, the law does no such thing. It doesn't prohibit storing user data outside of Russia, so it doesn't offer any privacy protections whatsoever. What it does is require that data to also be stored inside Russia, where it is subject to warrants (and warrantless wiretapping under SORM-2 and similar arrangements). Which is really everything you need to know about the purpose of the law.

Speaking more broadly - yeah, Russia is an authoritarian populist regime with a known penchant for human rights abuses and suppression of political dissent. And so it's going to be judged as such when it does things, not equally to any other country. This is similar to how we judge people differently, and ascribe different motivations, based on their past actions that we know about.

The problem is, that legislation does not actually protect citizen data. All code is still controlled by LinkedIn, and Russian goverment still have no idea what it does. If FBI (or CIA or any other agency) comes to LinkedIn with an order, then does it matter if the technician serving the request pulls the data from Russian, European or US database? The data will be delivered anyway.

Moreover, the law does not actually prevent the companies from storing data somewhere else -- Article 12 mentions many allowed reasons to send the data to other countries.

What this law, however, allows is for government to apply pressure on the company by treating to seize their servers (such as this case: https://torrentfreak.com/police-shut-down-russian-rapidshare... ). I see no other reason for the law.

> I see no other reason for the law.

Petty attempt to force big companies to pay for Russian hosting.

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