Ten websites closed due to extremism in Russia in Feb
MOSCOW. Feb 19 (Interfax) - The first ten extremism-related websites have been closed upon the request of the Prosecutor General's Office in the framework of the law on control over Internet resources, which came into effect.
"The Prosecutor General's Office sent a total of over ten requests, which have been executed, to Roskomnadzor [Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications] since February 1, 2014," Prosecutor General's Office spokesperson Marina Gridneva told Interfax.
"The monitoring of a number of websites in the Internet has revealed instances of circulating materials encouraging terrorist activities and calling for violence regarding citizens over nationality and changing basis of Russia's constitutional structure," Gridneva said.
This includes a number of websites campaigning for the activities of Islamic terrorist organizations, she said.
In accordance with the powers given by law, on February 17, 2014 Roskomnadzor sent to the Prosecutor General's Office demands obliging it to take measures to restrict access to three extremist Internet resources and their blog versions.
"Pre-investigation checks have been organized over incidents found in order to hold criminally liable the individuals, who posted appeals for carrying out extremist activities," Gridneva said.
The Prosecutor General's Office is currently gathering material in order to restrict access to certain websites containing appeals for extremist activities.
"Inspections over around 200 reports of citizens and officials regarding the existence of banned information in the Internet have been organized and following them it will be decided on blocking the information resources," Gridneva said.
