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

Snowden, a whistleblower who loved to quote the UN Declaration of Human Rights, landed in a country with a miserable record on human rights. He appealed to NGOs and investigative journalists for help, but in Russia human rights activists are branded “foreign agents” or spies, and investigative journalism is under threat of complete extinction. Snowden argued that he took risks to expose state secrets in the interests of freedom of information, but he remained a guest of a regime that for years has been suppressing freedom of information. Although he justified his actions by the need to defend the Internet from government intrusion, when he landed in Moscow, the Kremlin was in the middle of a large-scale offensive against Internet freedoms.

Snowden failed to respond to these challenges. For months he tried to pretend he was not in Russia, but just somewhere, in some limbo, that he found asylum in an unmarked country that would never extradite him to the United States. The Kremlin helped him preserve this fiction, and he was never dragged into being a tool of the Russian propaganda media outlets. He was allowed to keep out of sight.

After ten months in Moscow, Snowden asked Putin at a staged news conference about surveillance, but Putin merely deflected the question.

Since the day Snowden landed in Moscow the symbols of the global Internet—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—came under increasing pressure from the Kremlin to make the global Internet local, to destroy the very nature of the global network. Snowden didn’t say a word about it except for his single call to the Putin news conference.

Snowden’s revelations suggest he aspired to fight for Internet freedom not only in the United States but around the world; however, Russia was omitted from his fight. He left his home country to campaign for more transparency surrounding the intelligence agencies’ activities, and found himself living in Moscow, heavily protected by Russian secret services—behind the walls, shielded from the world outside.

At the same time Snowden was in Moscow, Russia was already attempting to change the global rules of the Internet. That too seemed to escape Snowden’s attention.

Vladimir Putin was certain that all things in the world—including the Internet—existed with a hierarchical, vertical structure. He was also certain that the Internet must have someone controlling it at the top. He viewed the United States with suspicion, thinking the Americans ruled the web and that it was a CIA project. Putin wanted to end that supremacy. Just as he attempted to change the rules inside Russia, so too did he attempt to change them for the world. The goal was to make other countries, especially the United States, accept Russia’s right to control the Internet within its borders, to censor or suppress it completely if the information circulated online in any way threatened Putin’s hold on power.

Andrey Krutskikh devoted his entire career in the Russian Foreign Ministry to arms control. He joined the diplomatic service in 1973, right after university, and served in the ministry for the final eighteen years of the Soviet Union’s existence. He admired the diplomatic style of the stolid and uncompromising foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, known informally in the West as Mr. Nyet. Krutskikh often called Gromyko “great.”

From the very beginning of his service Krutskikh’s work centered on disarmament, nuclear weapons, and the so-called main adversaries, the United States and Canada. When he was twenty-four years old, in 1975, he was sent to Salt Lake City as a member of the Soviet delegation to negotiate strategic nuclear arms control. Krutskikh’s experience at the negotiations in Salt Lake City left a strong impression on him. It was a time when Soviet diplomats had stature; they decided the fate of the world and spoke on equal terms with the Americans. After the Soviet collapse and into the late 1990s Krutskikh continued to focus on arms-control issues and rose through the ranks of the ministry. He was not a smooth or slick diplomat; he had a rather agitated manner—expressive, his hands always in motion. Krutskikh soon wondered whether arms control could be useful in the emerging realm of cyber conflict.

Among a particular group of Russian generals who represented FAPSI, the powerful electronic intelligence agency that had grown out of the KGB, a similar mindset was developing. The agency’s headquarters was located in a stark, modern terraced building with giant antenna globes on the roof not far from the KGB headquarters. Like the US NSA, FAPSI was responsible for information security, signals, and electronic intelligence. For many years their generals watched the growth of the Internet with suspicion, thinking it was a threat to Russia’s national security, because in the early days the Russian Internet was built with Western technology, and they were obsessed with the fear that it would be thoroughly penetrated by the Americans.

The leader of this group of suspicious generals was Vladislav Sherstyuk, a colonel-general in the intelligence wing of the agency and a KGB officer since 1966. By the 1990s he became head of the very mysterious and powerful Third Department of FAPSI, in charge of spying on foreign telecommunications. All Russian centers of electronic espionage abroad were subordinated to this department, including the radio interception center at Lourdes in Cuba, which was in charge of monitoring and intercepting radio communications from the United States. Sherstyuk was a spymaster, determined to exploit communications to steal US secrets and protect Russia against espionage of the same kind. This naturally made him wary of the Internet, where so much was beyond his control.

When the war in Chechnya began, Sherstyuk was put in charge of FAPSI’s group there, and he organized the interception of Chechens’ communications. In December 1998 he was appointed director of FAPSI, a mighty intelligence service in its own right that competed head-to-head with the FSB. Among other things, they had a very special role in controlling the government’s most sensitive communications networks.

Krutskikh and the FAPSI generals spoke the same language of suspicion—a language of threats posed by the Internet. In early 1999 Krutskikh was helping to draft a resolution for the UN General Assembly that reflected these views and warned that information—the Internet—could be misused for “criminal or terrorist purposes” and could undermine “the security of States.” In other words, information technologies had to be controlled because they could be dangerous. The resolution was adopted without a vote. [1] “Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security,” introduced by Russia as a draft resolution in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, A/RES/53/70, January 4, 1999.

Krutskikh and the generals viewed the Internet as a battleground for information warfare. (This term should not be mixed with cyberwarfare, which is mostly about protecting a nation’s critical digital networks from hackers.) For Krutskikh and the generals, information warfare encompasses something political and menacing, including “disinformation and tendentious information” that is spread to incite psychological warfare, used for altering how people make decisions and how societies see the world. [2] Vladimir Markomenko, “Nevidimaya Zatyazhnaya voina” [Invisible Protracted War], Nezevisimaya Gazeta , August 16, 1997. Markomenko was then the first deputy director of FAPSI. In contrast to those who celebrate free media and the Internet as a glorious information superhighway that opens limitless possibilities for discovery, Krutskikh and the generals worried that it could become the front lines of conflict between nations and hostile groups.