Makarov: Belarus needs national law on information security

Belarus needs a national law on information security, Deputy Chief of the National Security Institute Oleg Makarov said during the 11th international conference on the management of information flows held at the Academy of Public Administration under the auspices of the President of the Republic of Belarus, BelTA learned from the director of the academy’s press center Yuri Zaitsev.

"The development of a state is associated with information technology. At the same time, information technology creates new threats to national security. People have started feeling the impact of a destructive influence, including cybercrime and various information manipulations, which, among other things, exceed the harmfulness of real-world threats given the vastness of the Internet,” said Oleg Makarov. According to him, Belarus still does not have a national law on information security, and this is a big problem. In the near future it is planned to prepare a number of normative acts and bilateral international agreements in this field, such as the current Belarusian-Russian agreement, he added.

Oleg Makarov also stated that the CIS member states seek to find an alternative to the West's military approach to the understanding of information security. The expert believes that "we need to fight not by force but by law: defend the legitimate interests of the citizens and establish the liability for information breaches like the one prescribed, for example, in the Penal Code".

The shape and effectiveness of the analytical system of information confrontation in the Internet was the topic of the report by First Vice Rector of the Academy of Public Administration under the aegis of the President Alexander Ivanovsky. He told the conference about a study conducted at the academy into the information wave created around the situation in Ukraine. The project was implemented on a high scientific level and may be of interest to the media and government agencies involved in the study of the socio-political processes.

The analysis covered the electronic texts (about 650 articles) that have appeared in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian and American media. "The monitoring data allowed us to evaluate the propaganda level on the Internet and to build an index of aggressiveness of the information wave. It turned out that the ratio of negative to positive materials in different countries varies greatly. For example, the CNN and BBC websites were the epicenter of aggressiveness. Reports by BelTA were strictly neutral. The statistics for expressiveness and subjectivity of the texts was the same," said Alexander Ivanovsky.

Andrei Chugunov, the director of the e-Government Technology Center at the ITMO University (St. Petersburg), shared the Russian experience in the development of the information society. He spoke about the tasks related to the Eurasian economic integration. He stressed that the countries should think about cross-border electronic services, specific joint information policy, and comprehensive research. International partnership in information technology and e-Government is, in his opinion, one of the defining factors.

The 11th international conference on the management of information flows brought together experts from seven countries-Vietnam, Belarus, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Russia and Ukraine. After the plenary session the conference worked in various sections and roundtables. Topics discussed included the protection of information resources, modeling of socio-economic processes, information policy and me