Re: MInor Correction
Spot the difference?
Nope. I do not.
Do not understand me wrong - they are as lawless as it can get.
The actual lawlessness, however is NOT at the level of laws and not even at the level of courts. It is at the level of enforcement. That is where people get killed, tortured, arbitrarily detained and suffer from a heart stroke which upon independent autopsy happens to be lung embolism from beating in the chest area combined with having a water heater shovelled down your throat and turned on if you are not signing the confessions. This is out of the front page of one of their opposition newspapers from yesterday by the way (CIA may take some notes as replacement for waterboarding).
Back to the actual law (not the wonders of Russian law enforcement).
They have the law, it was voted for, it passed legal review (it was challenged by SPs) and a challenge was not accepted by the constitutional court. Do we like it or not, the process has been followed so no point to parrot the Daily Mail please. I suggest following the entire thing from A to Z how it developed and reading the actual law, discussion, challenges, etc.
They actually have significantly higher protections on privacy of communications than us in their constitution and the law has been found to comply with that. Whoever wrote the cheat sheet for Irina (the law author) knew what they were doing. The escrow is for keys only. The data never officially leaves the SP until there is a court order. The keys are not the communication, hence the constitutional protection does not apply. This is the scary bit and this is what will inevitably be copied one day by us and others.
Their laws as written are something which is worth reviewing, reading and stealing ideas. In fact some of our politicians do that (and not pay copyright fees). All in all, UK is significantly more "lawless" in this area. There are more backdoors and holes in UK surveillance legislation than in a good piece of Swiss cheese.