VOA News
Russia’s attorney general has ordered blockage of the site, known as “The Wayback Machine,” citing legislation that bans minors from accessing sites that contain pornography, sexual abuse, or extremist activities.
The Wayback Machine stores cached images of webpages around the world going back as far as 1996 and contains almost 500 billion stored images.
The Kremlin says the unprecedented block is needed to keep dangerous information from reaching minors online. But Russian free speech activists argue the ban is just the latest move by Moscow to erase anything on the web it finds objectionable.
According to Rublacklist.net, a censorship monitoring project run by a group known as the Russian Pirate Party, the block is due to a single cached webpage called “Solitary Jihad in Russia.” The page contains discussion of “partisan resistance”, and states that Islamic sharia law “must be instituted all across the world.”
But the Wayback Machine still contains an earlier snapshot of the webpage and because it uses the HTTPS encrypted protocol, Russian authorities said they had no choice but to ban the Wayback Machine. Rublacklist.net reports access to the Wayback Machine was cut at the end of June.
