The Americans have seen the light: shutting down their Internet services only strengthens Russian control in Crimea
Moscow - Simferopol, February 18 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Four global human rights organizations asked the US Treasury Department to immediately return access to American web services to Crimeans so that they do not completely fall under Russian information control.
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Access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Global Voices Advocacy and the Open Technology Institute, which advocate for human rights in the digital age, wrote an open letter to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC, the US Treasury Department's sanctions agency) calling for "immediate protection of free movement of information in the Crimean region of Ukraine." Activists are asking OFAC to issue a general license allowing the provision of services, software and devices to Crimeans “for personal communications via the Internet.”
Let us recall that under the terms of the US trade embargo against the “illegally annexed” Crimea, American companies disconnected Crimean users from Google Apps and the Apple App Store, Paypal and GoDaddy. Google Chrome stopped updating. “Current OFAC regulations on Crimea are such that it is unclear whether the legal provision of even the most simple Internet services or software is permissible,” human rights activists quote RBC.
The situation in Crimea in this sense is even more difficult than in the “rogue countries” - Syria, Iran, Sudan and Cuba. OFAC allows residents of these countries to provide free tools and technologies for personal communications (messengers, browsers, email, plug-ins, etc.), and for Iran and Cuba an exception is made for paid services (for example, Skype with a subscription fee).
At the end of January, OFAC issued a General License for the provision of telecommunications and postal services by American companies in favor of Crimea - in other words, it allowed the service of personal calls and mail between the peninsula and the United States. But the license made no mention of Internet communications or personal communications devices such as smartphones.
The authors of the letter emphasize that returning Crimeans’ access to American services fully meets the interests of the United States. After all, if the peninsula is isolated from American communications, users will begin to rely on “affordable and competitive” analogues from Russian providers.
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