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

A year later Lokshina, sitting in a coffee shop in Moscow, remarked that Snowden seems to have been trapped too. “In fact he’s in prison,” she said. “No doubt in a comfortable one—he is well fed there, and he did not need anything. But he does not walk the streets of this city.”

Snowden may not have known or realized it, but his disclosures emboldened those in Russia who wanted more control over the Internet. The State Duma debated Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance in special hearings. A vice speaker of the Russian parliament suggested that the Snowden disclosures meant Russian citizens should be forbidden from keeping their personal data on foreign servers. “We should provide a digital sovereignty for our country,” he said. Ruslan Gattarov, chairman of one of the pro-Kremlin youth organizations and a member of the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, invited Snowden to come to the Council to “investigate” what he described as the surrender of Russian citizens’ data to the American intelligence agencies. [24] Miriam Elder, “Russia Needs to Reclaim Its ‘Digital Sovereignty’ from US, says MP,” Guardian , June 19, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/russia-digital-soveriegnty-nsa-surveillance .

This “digital sovereignty” claim was cover for something the Kremlin wanted all along—to force Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s services, Gmail and YouTube, to be subject to Russian legislation, which meant providing backdoor access to the Russian security services. It was a way to have SORM black boxes installed on the Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter servers. Since spring of 2011 the FSB had been lamenting it had no means to intercept chats and e-mail exchanges on Facebook and Gmail, and now the chances appeared to be improved. The pretext of protecting Russian personal data—the notion of “digital sovereignty”—was raised in order to impose new controls on the Internet, bring the global platforms to heel, and put their servers on the Russian soil. Snowden’s name was being invoked by those who wanted to carry out new repressive measures in Russia.

On August 1, 2013, Snowden was granted one year of asylum in Russia, and the next day he left Sheremetyevo, still evading journalists. Kucherena reported the news, saying he personally put Snowden in the car. For months to come, Snowden refused to talk to Russian and Moscow-based foreign journalists. To us, the silence seemed odd and unpleasant. After all, Snowden wasn’t afraid of journalists—he had used them to leak the thousands of pages of secret documents. He also spoke to American journalists coming from the United States. Snowden was, in theory, in favor of openness. So why did he refuse to talk to those of us in Russia who, in our journalism, fought every day for openness and freedom of information? Was he being manipulated again? And if so, by whom?

On September 4, 2013, Putin said in an interview that when Snowden first approached the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, the case was immediately reported to him, but he instructed aides to send Snowden away. That part of the story hadn’t been reported before, but was it true? Was Putin really that ambivalent about this former NSA contractor who had upset the United States, or was he playing a clever game? [25] Interview to Channel One and Associated Press news agency, the transcript on the site of the Kremlin, September 4, 2013, http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/5935 .

While Snowden remained out of sight, Russia’s security services achieved another dramatic leap in their capability to eavesdrop on the Internet. In the autumn of 2013 new SORM technical guidelines were announced that would require phone operators and Internet providers to store information for twelve hours at a time until it could be retrieved by the authorities. The guidelines also made it possible for the security services to intercept correspondence that users send through services such as Gmail and Yahoo and the popular ICQ instant messages. The goal of the updated requirements was very clear: to expand surveillance capabilities to intercept messages and information passed through foreign Internet providers.

The reaction was surprising. On October 21 VimpelCom, one of Russia’s largest telecom companies, publicly—and courageously—denounced the government’s plans to expand the SORM capabilities. VimpelCom sent a letter to the Ministry of Communications, criticizing the plan as unconstitutional. Next another major provider, Mail.ru, said the requirement to keep data for twelve hours “violates the Constitution of the Russian Federation, in particular the right to privacy, confidentiality of correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other communications” and is “inconsistent with a number of federal laws and codes.” [26] Vladislav Novy, “Spetsluzbi ne vpisalis v traffik” [Secret Services Didn’t Make into Traffic], Kommersant , October 24, 2013, www.kommersant.ru/doc/2326973 . The service also protested that a facility to keep that much data might not cost $100 million, as VimpelCom suggested, but more like $400 million. “This will require approximately 30–40 petabytes of data for the entire Runet every 12 hours,” said Vice President and Technical Director Vladimir Gabrielyan. Anton Nossik wrote that the “FSB wants to know about every one of our moves on the Internet: Who and what we sent, and from whom they received, what sites come in, what we have there, name and password.”

Nossik also wrote that “recording of all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic of 75 million Russian users requires, without any exaggeration, petabytes and exabytes of disk space.” He warned that the new SORM requirements would force users to pay more for Internet services. But the protests did not stop the Kremlin from doing what it wanted to do. The decree implementing the new SORM requirements was signed by the minister of communications on April 16, 2014, and required all operators to install the equipment by March 31, 2015. The requirement to keep twelve hours of data remained in the decree. [27] Andrei Soldatov, “Russia’s Spying Craze,” Moscow Times , October 31, 2014, www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/russias-spying-craze/488773.html . The Ministry of Communications officials also admitted that the new SORM black boxes are strengthened by DPI, as the devices can monitor the Internet traffic on the application level. [28] The roundtable on SORM at the MSK-IX conference, with Vartan Khachaturov, deputy director of the infrastructure department at the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, present, December 10, 2013, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuqiBGhJBtA . The two most intrusive surveillance technologies were finally combined, to be used by the Russian security services all over the country.

When all this was happening, Snowden was silent. Although he gave some interviews to American journalists, he refused to comment on Russian affairs and dropped off the radar until April 17, 2014. We tried repeatedly to contact Snowden, and we also asked American journalist, lawyer, and author Glenn Greenwald for an interview, but Greenwald never responded to our e-mails.

On that day Putin held another of his annual question-and-answer sessions in which citizens call in on a direct line. Much had changed since 2013; the success of the Sochi Olympics and the annexation of Crimea had generated a mood of intense patriotism and anti-Western sentiment. Putin’s approval ratings had soared.

As always, the call-in show was broadcast live by three major TV channels along with three radio stations, and it lasted nearly four hours. A well-staged event, it started with calls from Crimea, with “Thank you, Mr. President, on behalf of all the people of Crimea,” and other displays of boosterism. Hours passed, and all of a sudden a host in the studio in charge of fielding phone calls turned not to Putin but to the television watchers and proclaimed, “We have a surprise video call, which I would describe as sensational. It was sent by a person who has made an information revolution by exposing a mass surveillance program that affected millions of people around the world.”