Russian state company says, hey, let's store all the Internet correspondence in a single data center

The state-owned corporation Rostec, which is charged with promoting hi-tech industry, has proposed the creation of a unified data storage center to house all Internet correspondence, according to the newspaper Vedomosti.

The storage center under development is the meant to accommodate new regulations introduced by anti-terrorist legislation signed by Vladimir Putin earlier this summer. The new laws grant police sweeping powers to monitor Russians' Internet activity, requiring telecoms operators to store all conversations and make the data accessible to law enforcement. The laws also ban most, if not all, forms of online encryption.

Rostec officials reportedly believe creating a single data center to store the country's correspondence would reduce the costs of implementing the new laws. Rostelecom, Russia's leading long-distance telephony provider, has developed a similar proposal, says Vedomosti.