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

For a year DAS had been under constant criticism, accused of illegal wiretapping of journalists, opposition politicians, human rights groups, and even Supreme Court justices. The scale of the scandal caused journalists to coin the term “Colombian Watergate.” [14] For details, see Camilla Pease-Watkin, “DAS Scandal ‘Worse than Watergate,’” Colombia Reports , June 18, 2010, http://colombiareports.co/us-report-das-scandal-worse-than-watergate , and the text of the report, “Far Worse than Watergate Widening Scandal Regarding Colombia’s Intelligence Agency,” prepared by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, US Office on Colombia, Center for International Policy and Washington Office on Latin America, www.lawg.org/storage/colombia/farworsethanwatergatefinalfinal.pdf , and Joshua Goodman, “Ex-Spy Chief Wanted in Colombia for Wiretaps Surrenders,” Associated Press, January 31, 2015, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/spy-chief-wanted-colombia-wiretaps-surrenders-28625517 .

In the announcement of the press conference DAS promised to present some new crucial evidence to address the question of illegal wiretapping. The DAS director, Felipe Muñoz, a thirty-nine-year-old energetic technocrat, trained at the London School of Economics and Colombia University, appeared at the press conference with Koval sitting alongside.

Muñoz announced that DAS had conducted the internal investigation and invited an independent expert from Russia, with more than thirty years experience in the field, to examine leaked recordings of intercepted calls and compare them with the recordings made by DAS legally. He tried to prove that the agency was not involved in illegal wiretapping. Then he presented Sergei Koval.

Koval stated that he had applied more than twenty various audio characteristics in the course of examination, and the analysis showed that the recordings had been made using completely different types of equipment. “The conclusion was unequivocal: these wiretaps were not registered with this type of equipment,” Koval added. [15] “Chuzadas no fueron hechas por el DAS: Felipe Muñoz” [Wiretappings Were Not Made by the DAS: Felipe Muñoz]. See also SpeechPro’s press release, “STC Expert Helped Justifying Colombian Security Department,” October 6, 2009, http://speechpro.com/media/news/2009–10–06 .

If true, this would absolve the security service from having made illegal wiretaps. Koval claimed the Colombian secret service didn’t have the necessary equipment to produce the type of recordings leaked to the media. Muñoz, in turn, was happy to point a finger to some private unidentified spies, “We have sufficiently strong preliminary evidence to say that there is a market for mobile equipment interception which lacks control.”

Koval had come halfway around the world to speak up for the Colombian secret police. And it turned out these public declarations were wrong. A few months later a prosecutor in Colombia declared that he had proof that a DAS team had spied on public figures with the knowledge of officials in President Álvaro Uribe’s office. [16] Chris Kraul, “Colombia Spy Chief Works to Clean Up Agency,” Los Angeles Times , April 22, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/22/world/la-fg-colombia-das-qa-20100423 . Eventually some DAS officials confirmed that it was indeed the DAS that had conducted illegal wiretapping. One employee admitted he had received orders directly from the DAS director, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, and the intended recipient of wiretap transcripts was President Álvaro Uribe. [17] William Romero, a former senior official of Colombia’s DAS security service, told radio stations that he received orders from then DAS director Maria del Pilar Hurtado—who went into exile in Panama in the summer of 2014—to spy on Supreme Court justices. He also said that the main intended recipient of transcripts of the intercepted communication was ex-President Álvaro Uribe. For details, see EFE, “Uribe Ordered Illegal Wiretaps, Former Colombian Spy Says,” Latin American Herald Tribune , August 1, 2014, www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=381815&CategoryId=12393 . In late 2011 the agency was finally disbanded, and the expert on speech recognition was long gone from Bogotá, back to Russia, and then on to Mexico.

On the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in a glossy new business center, there is a small company named Protei. The company’s office was a bit chaotic in 2011—they had just moved in—with tables and wires all over the place. The computers had yet to be installed, but Protei was already making something highly desired outside of Russia: the equipment for making sure that the black boxes—the SORM technologies—would work in countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where authoritarian rulers with miserable human rights practices and intolerant of democracy and dissent were eager to use the technology to control the Internet. The company produced all kinds of technology from SORM-1 to SORM-3, from phone eavesdropping to Internet intercepts. In December 2011 WikiLeaks and Privacy International launched the Spy Files project, a database on companies that sell such surveillance gear around the world. [18] “WikiLeaks: The Spy Files,” www.wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html . Although most of the vendors are British, Israeli, German, and American companies, it also included Koval’s SpeechPro and Protei.

We went to see another engineer who had made it in the world of secret services and secret surveillance. Vadim Sekeresh was head of the SORM department at Protei. A phlegmatic, forty-year-old graduate of the applied mathematics department of St. Petersburg University, he seemed unruffled by the WikiLeaks disclosure. Like so many other engineers, he did not ask deep moral or ethical questions about how his products were being used. “I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Sekeresh said of the report. “I didn’t really look into it because the whole thing doesn’t bother me. After all, we are not producing the listening devices, or bugs. And… we aren’t the only ones producing such tech anyway.” [19] Vadim Sekeresh, interview with authors, December 2011. A few months later he told Andrei in an e-mail, “Lots of crimes are solved thanks to technology. It’s obvious that everything could be used to harm, but it’s not related to the producers.”

In other words, it is not the engineers’ fault.

In 2012, the year Internet filtering was introduced in Russia, Protei developed a product based on DPI technology to implement the censorship of Roskomnadzor. In March 2015 Protei announced that the company had successfully deployed an Internet-filtering system based on DPI on the network of Kyrgyzstan’s telecom operator MegaCom, one of the largest in the country. Russian engineers, once again, developed the hardware that brought one of the world’s most intrusive Internet-filtering technologies to Central Asia.

In the 1990s the global nature of the Internet meant wires. When a user got connected, he could send his e-mail or visit a website anywhere in the world. In the 2000s the Internet meant the rise of global platforms that allowed users to share the same social networks, e-mail services, search engines, and clouds. The Internet became more of a common ground for people from Argentina to Russia—they used the same Facebook, the same Twitter. That also meant that the information users exchanged was stored inside systems located far from the users—systems that could not be readily controlled by nations, their leaders, or their secret services. Most of the servers were located in the United States.