Apparently, the Russian government is using web censorship legislation which it told people was designed to protect kids to silence the websites that criticize the government.

A few months ago, the Russian Federation has passed an online blacklist bill to require Internet service providers to filter certain portals. At the time the authorities promised that the blacklist would only be used to protect kids from harmful content, like child porn, suicide instructions, and pro-drug propaganda.

Nevertheless, in a few weeks, a popular blogging service, LiveJournal, was censored, as well as the Russian equivalent of Wikipedia. Being confident that people understand nothing about censorship, the Russian authorities are now targeting journalists they don’t like. For instance, they added a website to the list which was used by prominent free speech and civil liberties reporters of the country who have criticized the government.

The authorities insist that they put the websites on the blacklist due to kids pornography elements, but Access pointed out that instead of simply removing such material, they have banned the entire website. As a result, they have silenced a couple of prominent journalists: Andrei Malgin, who has been very critical of the authorities and Vladimir Pribylovsky, who dared to make public a large database of government misdeeds and disclosed official documents which exposed corruption in the country.

The worst part is that western countries like the United Kingdom, Iceland, Australia and New Zealand are also considering bringing in such filters. In this case, they only need to bring in the claim to protect kids from online pornography, terrorists and so on. Once the instruments for censorship are enforced, the politicians can follow the same pattern as their Russian chums and censor any portal they like.