№ 5 - 2002
Morozov I.L.
Informational Security of a Political System

Increased efficiency of providing people with information, its greater “transparency” and availability for all actors of the political process, information streams which it’s become possible to generate bypassing the state agencies, as well as other effects of the Internet, are usually treated, when discussed in Russian political science, as most important prerequisites of liberalism and democracy. On having noted this, the author of the article sets himself the task to demonstrate that liberality and democratism of the Internet are nothing more than a myth. In this connection he singles out and analyzes the key problems and risks of which the ignoration parallel with mass introduction of information technologies into political processes is fraught, in his opinion, with a whole range of destabilizing complications right up to recurrences of totalitarianism. The product of the modern epoch, from his point of view, consists in that in case of the state agencies’ liberal approach to further development of the Internet there emerges a serious threat of this system being used by extremist forces, while in case the system is taken under political state control, the power finds in its hands the real key to a society of total controllability.