In the Republic of Moldova, a website can be easily closed when there is an ordinance to this effect. Furthermore, a relevant case was witnessed in Moldova in April 2009, when all the service providers barred access to the Internet without such an order and without a decision by the Supreme Court of Justice, the representative of the Concern “Starnet” Alexei Muntean said in the public debate “Real and nonexistent dangers to the basic human rights generated by the government’s intention to modify information technology regulations” that was organized by IPN News Agency and Radio Moldova.
According to Alexei Muntean, the bill to amend and supplement the legislation to ensure information security and combat cybercrime is ambiguous. As regards data storage, in Moldova the state’s problems are solved with the people’s hands. “In this case, the operators are those that will bear the whole financial burden. Why do you oblige us to store tens of terabits for each user daily? Enormous investments must be made for the purpose,” he stated.
Alexei Muntean noted that each operator will have to buy a storage facility of 10 terabits, which can be enough for a year. This costs US$3,000. “What will they do now? Make the end user pay the bill? As an operator, I’m not interested in storing all the information and cannot even do it because this is very costly,” he said.
The representative of “Starnet” stated that the operators will not have money to cover the costs imposed by the bill. A number of small operators will have to stop work and better conditions will be thus created for such monopoles as “Moldtelecom”.
Alexei Muntean also said that the terrorists do not use simple protocols, but cryptic systems. As to the protection of minors and child pornography, antivirus systems that block particular websites and webpages started to be developed. “There is also the Parental Control software that furnish the content of all the child’s chats and pictures sent through social networking sites. An awareness-raising campaign will be enough for avoiding these risks, while the costs are rather low,” he stated.
He asked to invite representatives of businesses to debates on different legislative initiatives that refer to them. “You should consult us and listen to us and know our financial problems as the state does not work without us, if we do not pay taxes. You could exempt these investments from taxes. We cannot make investments and be told in two years that there will be a new code,” said Alexei Muntean.
The April 4 debate is the 52nd of the series of debates “Developing political culture by public debates” that are staged with the support of the German Foundation “Hanns Seidel”.
