FSB Targets Bloggers

This cartoon, which appeared in the Moscow Times on April 27, 2014, accompanies an article that equated recent Russian internet legislation with the values of George Orwell’s 1984. The cartoon features an Federal Security Service agent talking into a microphone, reporting that he is “watching the blogger” from his perch in a tree level with the window of the blogger’s apartment. Inside the apartment, the blogger sits in an illuminated room with his hands tense and perched over the keys, his teeth gritted. The cartoon is meant to communicate the crackdown on bloggers in Russia and draw the connection between lack of internet freedom and growing state power. That the cartoon appeared in an English-language newspaper and references a mainstay of English language literature which is often part of the American debate over surveillance suggests that it appeals to a Western logic and draws references between the logic behind the NSA and GCHQ controversies and that of Russia.^[i]

I included this cartoon because it sums up well the experience of the blogger on an increasingly balkanized internet, defined by state powers and enforced by security forces. This cartoon encapsulates the situation of Russia’s crackdown and its global parallels.