why livejournal scares me

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When SUP took over Livejournal, and there were rumours flying around about SUP being connected with the KGB, I was worried, in a sort of conspiracy-theory-paranoid sort of way. The sort where you don't actually quite believe it could possibly be true, but you daren't not believe it just in case.

News broke this week about a Russian blogger, 21-year-old Savva Terentyev, who was arrested for "hate speech" and was this week officially charged, a "crime" for which he may face a fine equivalent to half a year's annual wage for the annual Russian worker, or 2 years in jail with hard labour.

His "crime" was to make a comment (not a post, just a comment) on the Livejournal of another blogger, Boris Suranov, in which he was critical about local police. When Terentyev was arrested in August 2007 his comment was forcibly deleted (by livejournal.ru management, presumably) but a screenshot of it has been preserved here.  Not that I expect any of my friendslist read Russian, but, you know.

The website Pajamas Media reports the following response from our favourite Mr Nossik, whose position is unclear but he seems to have been at the time a very big fish in LJ.ru:

“The ignorance of local judges often plays a role in the outcome of cases connected to the internet. I hope that with many journalists present, the judge will look at the essence of the case and not simply hand down a guilty verdict.” Nosik later said: “The people who launched the criminal case are trying in this way to portray police-turned-crooks as a social group that enjoys protection from Russian legislation. It seems to me that it ought be us who are protected by the law, not crooks.”

And less than 4 months after this arrest, Livejournal.com was bought out by SUP, with Nossik as a major player somewhere in the decision-making (even though nobody can tell exactly where, right now, because "blogging evangelist" isn't much of a job description really).

It occurred to me right at the start that SUP's interest in Livejournal isn't advertising at all, it's nothing to do with business. It's purely a way to control Livejournal itself, which is by far the most popular website of any kind in Russia. Livejournal is bigger than Myspace, bigger than Facebook. Livejournal in Russia is very, very serious stuff. Now, seeing the timing of the takeover next to the timing of this very high profile case, makes me absolutely convinced of that.

Around the time of the SUP takeover, Mark Kraft, a previous employee of LJ admitted that there was code in place within Livejournal which could track when a LJ user logged on and off and which IP address they were currently connected to.

"Here's a secret that few people have talked about within LiveJournal.  Code was put into the site back when I was working for it that allowed administrators to track a user's IP address and notify administrators when they're online. It was added for the best of reasons because of a very serious criminal investigation in the US, but it could be misused by request of the Russian government if that authority and those privileges are unmonitored and that power is put into the wrong hands."

 Which means that LJ/SUP staff can tell not only when you are online but also where you are geographically (more or less). And therefore know where to send the KGB sweep to pick up the next poor Russian blogger guilty of exercising a basic human right for free speech.

And you know, anyone who says to me "Well I'm just so-n-so living in random-western-country, they aren't going to bother about me," I have just one thing to say. No they're not going to bother about YOU but are you really so selfish that you do not care about the rights of others? Livejournal under SUP scares the crap  out of me, not because I fear they might do something to me, but because of the many Russian-speaking bloggers who may find themselves in danger simply by posting their thoughts on LJ. It's them I fear for.

We welcome our new Russian Overlords.