MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian state Internet and media watchdog has launched a tender for experts who can identify pornographic material involving minors.
The ideal candidate would be educated to university level and have at least two years’ work experience in medicine, sociology, psychology, philology, culture studies or art history, the Roskomnadzor watchdog said.
Experts, working in teams of two, will be expected to field up to 200 requests daily and review various materials to establish whether they contain child porn.
The maximum price tag for an unspecified number of people to spend a year weeding out child porn is 43.7 million rubles ($1.4 million), the tender says.
Announced earlier this month, the tender closes on Nov. 12.
Since November 2012, Roskomnadzor has not needed a court order to blacklist websites hosting child porn and those deemed to be promoting suicide or illegal drugs.
The agency already faced criticism over some blacklisting decisions, particularly a ban on Japanese erotic cartoons, some of which were ruled to be child porn.
Russian law criminalizes the production and dissemination of both regular and child pornography, but gives no strict definition of either.
This lack of legal clarity has rendered the ban on regular porn de facto unexercised and has confounded lawmakers, who have repeatedly tackled the issue, but who remain unable to spell out a legal distinction between pornography, erotica and art.
