Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

The draft document described a government policy that would require all of Russia’s ISPs to install a device on their lines, a black box, that would connect them directly to the FSB. It would allow the FSB to silently and effortlessly eavesdrop on e-mails, which by 1998 had become the main method of communication on the Internet. The device was called SORM, an acronym in Russian for Systema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriatiy , or the System of Operative Search Measures. The document said that SORM was “a system of technical means for providing investigative procedures on electronic networks.”

More simply, eavesdropping on the Internet.

“Do what you want with that,” her contact said of the papers, suggesting she might pass them along to her editor at the magazine or give them to an editor at Computerra , another computer weekly popular among Russian programmers. Egorova realized the documents were a leak—a leak probably from FAPSI, intended to unmask the FSB’s plans to monitor all of the Russian Internet.

As she left the meeting, Egorova was uncertain what to do. But she knew she had to do something—and quickly. She called her editor, who was out of town. She called her contact at Computerra , who was also out of town. She knew she had been given the documents in a leak—it was pure politics—but wasn’t sure how to use them. Then she remembered Anatoly Levenchuk. She had met him only a few months beforehand, and his combative debating style had impressed her. Maybe he would know what to do with the information.

Levenchuk, then forty years old, had become something of a legend in the early days of the Russian Internet and was a well-respected expert in the stock market. But his real passion was ideas. He had become a devoted follower of libertarianism, and he firmly believed in the smallest possible government intrusion into the economy. He attempted to launch a libertarian political party in 1992, but it flopped and never got on the ballot. The ideas of libertarianism and freedom from government control were not widely or immediately grasped, and Levenchuk felt it needed to be explained to the Russian audience. With the arrival of the web, Levenchuk found the answer. In 1994 he established Libertarium.ru, a website that grew into an important source of libertarian ideas, a place for debate about freedom, and a launching pad for various public campaigns for change. [2] Anatoly Levenchuk, interview with authors, August 2014. He was often invited to speak at conferences, and when he gave a talk, he would immediately stand up, walk onto a stage, and wave his arms for emphasis, with his sentences laden with an evocative Rostov accent, which was much more emotional than Moscow’s everyday idiom.

Egorova called Levenchuk at home and said she needed to have a “serious talk” with him. He picked up her worried tone and suggested they meet. There, she showed him the papers. “Look,” she said. “It seems I’ve got a leak, and I don’t know what to do with it. But I think you should know what to do with that piece of paper.” She had a hard time persuading him at first; Levenchuk’s mind was wrapped up in a battle over the rules of the stock market—fighting with FAPSI, which wanted to make all stock market details as secret as possible. Levenchuk insisted that openness was essential in capital markets—it was the pillar of how a free market worked.

When Egorova said, insistently, that it was a leak— from FAPSI! —she finally got his attention.

Levenchuk read the document and decided immediately. His experience with the Internet made him particularly sensitive to what appeared to be almost unlimited powers granted to the FSB in the document. Although they would have to get an eavesdropping warrant from the court, the FSB was not obliged to show it to anyone, not even the Internet company they were tapping. The ISPs had no right to demand the FSB show it to them either, as they had no security clearance. Making matters worse, the ISPs would have to pay for the black boxes, the SORM equipment, and the installation, but they would have no access to it.

Pure and simple, the SORM box was a backdoor to Russia’s Internet, and the security service was about to open it.

Levenchuk and Egorova walked back to his residence, a cramped, three-room apartment in southeast Moscow, in the shabby district of Kuzminki. In the kitchen was a laptop and a scanner. They scanned the document, and she helped him create hyperlinks. The next day, on June 11, 1998, Levenchuk posted the SORM document online for the first time. [3] The document, in Russian, can be found at www.libertarium.ru/l_sorm_sormprojo .

This was probably not what the leakers envisioned. Egorova thought they wanted it passed to an editor, maybe written up as a small magazine item. Perhaps FAPSI intended it as nothing more than a shot across the bow of the FSB, a message that we know what you are doing . But the document had come into the hands of the flamboyant and outspoken Levenchuk, who had long been struggling for more openness, and now he had a chance to do something about it. By posting the document, he thought he might force the FSB to at least adhere to their own requirement to seek a warrant before they tapped the Internet. “I always understood these were the security services, and if they say they do it, it’s impossible to stop them,” he recalled. “I was interested in only one thing, whether they would tell the truth, whether they would comply with the rule about a warrant.” [4] Anatoly Levenchuk, interview with authors, August 2014.

Levenchuk didn’t stop there. He launched a public campaign to call attention to the draft and, in a larger sense, to push back against SORM. He called all his contacts in the news media, started collecting signatures in protest, and contacted the major telecom operators, where he had high-level contacts. He collected and posted on his website a list of questions that an ISP could ask the FSB when the security agents came to install the SORM equipment. He also solicited—and received—feedback from some of the ISPs. Levenchuk gleefully posted some of their feedback, maintaining the ISPs’ anonymity. The Internet service providers were furious with the FSB less because of the principle of eavesdropping but because they were being asked to pay for it.

“Full, primitive caveman savagery,” one service provider wrote. “Give them all, and more. And all at our own expense.” The provider added bitterly, “We will soon shoot each other on their orders, and bury—at our own expense.”

Levenchuk gave interviews and wrote articles, and the story of the Internet black boxes was reported domestically and internationally. A few service providers used Levenchuk’s suggested questions to push back when the FSB agents called to install the black boxes. But Levenchuk encountered something he never expected: the industry, in the end, did not resist. “It ended bitterly,” Levenchuk told us. “I won only a year. But it didn’t bring happiness to anyone. The providers, instead of resisting, they all gave up.” [5] Only one company resisted, in the southern city of Volgograd. The chief executive, Nail Murzakhanov, came under intense pressure. Eventually he left Volgograd and moved to St. Petersburg. Among those that installed the black boxes were the Internet pioneers Demos and Relcom.

Friends passed to Levenchuk warning messages from the FSB that he should be careful, but the security service never contacted him directly. In public the government and the security services stayed out of the debate about the SORM.

In 1998 there were no social networks in Russia; the Internet was mostly e-mail, some early e-commerce, and websites. But the Internet had already changed the rules for public debate. Unlike traditional media—newspapers, radio, television—it was not a one-directional flow of information. The Internet was filled with chats and discussion boards, and Levenchuk’s site posted dozens of comments and questions about the black boxes.