14 DAY TRIAL // The Moscow regime has taken yet another step towards censoring its citizens' right to surf a free Web by blocking access to the archive.org domain, most famous for housing the Wayback Machine (or Internet Archive), a collection of over 485 billion older Web pages.
According to Global Voices Online, the initial blocking order only targeted one single page from the Internet Archive, an article called “Solitary Jihad in Russia.”
One single Jihad-related article had the entire site blacklisted
Since the archive.org domain uses HTTPS, Russian ISPs weren't able to differentiate between one page of the Wayback Machine and the next, and the blocking order was soon expanded to the entire domain.
Russia's blocking legislature was put in place to combat child pornography at first, but the political regime has been slowly expanding it to cover more and more areas, like drug proliferation and information about suicide techniques.
While, in this case, it makes sense for the government to ban that specific article about religious extremism, since the article in question detailed the practice of partisan resistance in a foreign country, the same legislature had also been used in the past to put companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google against the wall when dealing with other issues.
Russia's war on the Internet is getting out of control
Only last September, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe announced that they were closing their Russian headquarters after Russia's President Vladimir Putin requested a law that forced all foreign firms to store user data on local Russian-based servers, a measure that would expose the hard drives and the information stored on them to police raids issued at the whims and orders of any crooked local prosecutor.
Couple this with Russia's own version of the Right To Be Forgotten Law, attempts at putting higher taxes in place for foreign tech companies, and a New York Times investigation that revealed state-operated troll farms, and you have a country that looks almost as bad as its predecessor, the USSR.