Vladimir Putin warns Russians to avoid Google: The Internet is a CIA 'special project'
Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, on April 23, 2014 [AFP]
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called the Internet a "CIA project" and warned Russians against making Google searches.
Putin assured a group of young journalists that the Internet was controlled from the start by the CIA and its surveillance continues today.
"That's life. That's how it's organised by Americans. You know all of this started during the dawn of the Internet as a special project of the CIA. And it keeps on developing," Putin said in televised comments.
Responding to questions from a young pro-Kremlin blogger, Putin warned that information entered on Google "all goes through servers that are in the States, everything is monitored there".
He also made ominous comments on Russia's most popular search engine Yandex, suggesting it could become more tightly controlled.
Yandex is "partly registered abroad and not just for tax reasons, but for other reasons too", Putin said, mentioning it is partly owned by international investors and reiterating his fear of foreign control of the Internet.
When Yandex was starting out, Putin said, they were "pressured" to have "that many Americans and this many Europeans among the executives".
"We must fight determinedly for our own interests. This process is happening. And we will support it from the government side, of course," he said without explaining what he means in detail.
Yandex handles some 60 percent of search queries in Russia and has a presence in several other countries. It allows users to search blogs and rates the most popular entries.
Yandex's shares fell over 4.3 percent on the NASDAQ after Putin's comments.
The company said in a statement quoted by news agencies that registration abroad is not done to dodge taxes but due to issues of corporate law, while foreign investment is a common feature of any Internet startup.
"Since our main business is in Russia, we pay almost all taxes in Russia," Yandex said.
While the Internet remains the main sphere for political discussion, Russia has recently cracked down on debate, with a new law allowing the government to block blacklisted sites without a court order.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny had his popular blog blocked and a widely read news site that covered opposition causes sacked its long-term editor and changed its stance after a warning on extremism from the state watchdog.
Russia this week passed in its initial stage new legislation that would force popular bloggers to register their sites and comply with similar regulations as mass media.
The 61-year-old president has frequently been scathing about the Internet, which he once described as "half pornography", unlike Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who posts snaps on Twitter.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted this month that the president is a regular Internet user and even sometimes laughs at jokey Photoshopped images.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
US authorities carried out the 13th and final federal execution of Donald Trump's presidency Saturday, media reports said, less than a week before the White House is taken over by Democrat Joe Biden, who opposes the death penalty.
Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old Black man, was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre-Haute in Indiana hours after the US Supreme Court rejected a stay of execution, the New York Times reported.
<p>Higgs was pronounced dead at 1:23 am local time, the Times said, citing a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.</p><p>In January 1996, Higgs invited three young women to his apartment near the capital Washington, along with two of his friends. When one of the young women rebuffed his advances, he offered to drive them home but instead stopped in an isolated federal nature reserve outside the city.</p><p>According to the Department of Justice, he then ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women. In 2000, he was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder. The man who pulled the trigger was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.</p><p>"It is arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr Higgs more severely than the actual killer," said Higgs' lawyer Shawn Nolan, in a plea for clemency addressed to President Trump at the end of January.</p><p>But the Republican president, a staunch defender of the death penalty, did not follow up. On the contrary, his administration fought in court to be able to proceed with the execution before he leaves the White House next week.</p><p>A court had ordered a stay of execution on the grounds that Higgs contracted Covid-19 and that, with his damaged lungs, he would likely suffer cruelly at the time of an injection of pentobarbital.</p><p>The Department of Justice immediately appealed and won the case.</p><p>The final bid to halt the execution then went before the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority -- firmly established by Trump appointees -- has systematically given the green light to federal executions since the summer.</p><h1>'This is not justice'</h1><p>The Trump administration resumed federal executions in July following a 17-year hiatus, carrying them out at an unprecedented rate.</p><p>Among the 12 people put to death since then was, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman -- Lisa Montgomery, executed Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health.</p><p>At the same time, states postponed all executions to avoid spreading the virus.</p><p>"This is not justice," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting note to Friday's decision by the Supreme Court. "After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully."</p><p>"When it did not, this Court should have. It has not. Because the Court continues this pattern today, I dissent."</p><p>President-elect Biden, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, has vowed to work with Congress to try to abolish the death penalty at the federal level.</p><p>Democratic lawmakers on Monday introduced a bill to that effect and since their party has regained control of the Senate, it stands a chance of being adopted.</p><p>In a statement Saturday the American Civil Liberties Union called on Biden to commute the sentences of all those on federal death row and remove the death penalty from all pending trials.</p><p>"This swift action is the only adequate response to the degrading and unconstitutional execution spree and to ensure that the federal government is never able to do this again," it said.</p>