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

Although Ukraine hewed to Russia’s eavesdropping system with equipment supplied by Russia, this does not necessarily mean that Russian secret services conducted all sensitive interceptions, but this option cannot be ruled out. But it does suggest that the Ukrainian security services modeled their surveillance capabilities after the most opaque and nontransparent example, with origins tracing back to the KGB.

Ukraine possessed not only the same equipment as Russia but also used the same terminology. In two decades of independence Ukraine didn’t modify the basic terms used to label its surveillance departments. In the Soviet KGB the unit in charge of surveillance was called the OTU ( Operativno-Technicheskoye Upravlenie , or the Operative-Technical Department), and eavesdropping and surveillance operations were identified in official documentation as ORM. That Soviet-style euphemism means Operativno-Rozisknie meropriatiya , or Operative-Search Measures.

In the 1990s the Russian FSB changed the name of the department to the UOTM (adding the word Measures to its title), but for years Ukraine remained attached to the Soviet acronym OTU. Now this department is called the DOTM (the Department of Operative-Technical Measures), echoing the Russian experience.

In late February in Kiev the chief of DOTM was fired along with Maxim Lenko, who had denied SBU’s role in intercepting the US diplomats’ conversation just three weeks before. [19] “Turchinov pomenyal vse rukovodstvo SBU” [Turchinov Changed the Entire Leadership of the SBU], Vesti Reporter , March 7, 2014, http://vesti-ukr.com/strana/41511-turchinov-pomenjal-vse-rukovodstvo-sbu . In July the chief of DOTM was changed again. [20] “Kadrovie peremeni: Poroshenko naznachil nachalnikom Departamenta operativno-technicheskikh meroptiyatiy SBU Frolova” [Personnel Changes: Poroshenko Appointed as Head of Operational and Technical Measures SBU Frolov], Ukranews, http://ukranews.com/news/129796.ru . This musical chairs of the DOTM indicated that the new Ukrainian authorities didn’t accept that the SBU had had nothing to do with the eavesdropping.

The saga of the Nuland interception and the larger battle for the digital space in Ukraine also reflects the reality throughout the former Soviet Union. Some of the nations that became independent in 1991 simply preserved the methods they inherited from the old regime. “Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, they all use a system that is much closer to SORM than to the European or American systems,” Shlyapobersky told us. In our own investigations we found documents confirming that Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan all have their national SORM systems. And in most cases this means their legislation and equipment has also been copied and imported from Russia. [21] Over two years we ran a joint investigation along with our friends at Citizen Lab (Canada) and Privacy International (UK) called “Russia’s Surveillance State.” We found that many countries that won their independence in 1991 still live in the shadow of Soviet surveillance practices. In August 2012 the Kyrgyz’s State Committee of National Security put on its website the draft of a national regulation on SORM, which was almost identical to the Russian interception system. The Kyrgyz parliament’s Defense and Security Committee stated in an economic analysis of the proposed SORM legislation that the Russian-made connection device linking SORM equipment and the PU would be three times cheaper than that of the Israeli firm Verint. Moscow hardly missed these opportunities to extend its intelligence positions on the soil of the former Soviet Union, but that option was considered as a minor evil by these countries’ governments. In November 2012 the Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz Service reported that Russian-made interception equipment could have been used to intercept phone conversations of Kyrgyz politicians leaked online two years ago. The Kyrgyz “telephone gate” scandal greatly embarrassed the provisional government, as it exposed how the positions and money were distributed. Making matters worse, the Russian producers’ tapping gear—Moscow’s Oniks-Line and Novosibirsk’s Sygnatek—were accused of retaining back doors in the equipment. “We shipped the interception equipment to Kyrgyzstan—it was an intergovernmental decision,” Sergei Pykhtunov, deputy director of the Sygnatek, admitted to us. But he said he was not aware of the scandal and dismissed the accusation. Sergei Bogotskoi, CEO of Oniks-Line, took the same line. The scandal did not cause the Kyrgyz government to change its approach to the national interception rules.

In September 2014, seven months after Maidan, Kiev was back to near normal. Independence Square was cleared; there was no sign of the barricades or burning tires that had once clogged the streets. It was time for the parliamentary elections, and Mustafa Nayyem, who had done so much to launch the Maidan movement with his post on Facebook, was one of the candidates. Andrei had difficulty catching up with his busy schedule, so Nayyem suggested they meet at the city court.

Nayyem had found out that a Ukrainian oligarch was trying to run for parliament despite the fact he had spent most of the 2000s out of the country, and this was against Ukrainian law. So Mustafa went to the court, and on the day we met, the hearings were under way.

The shabby Soviet-style building on Moskovskya Street, where the city court occupies a few floors, posed a striking contrast to the Moscow city court, which is all marble, statues, and expensive furniture. In a tiny room packed with journalists, a bald-headed Mustafa, wearing all black, with his two lawyers, faced three judges.

Mustafa’s lawyer was in the middle of a long peroration, full of details. The main judge turned left and whispered something to his colleague.

Mustafa’s lawyer exclaimed, “You should listen carefully to what I’m saying!”

“Well, the entire country listens to you now,” the judge said apologetically.

And he obviously didn’t mean only the lawyer.

Along with the pressure on global platforms such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, the Kremlin also wanted to ratchet up the pressure on two very popular Russian platforms—the social network VKontakte, with massive user groups of thousands of people involved in political events, and the search engine Yandex, which carried news headlines on its home page that had become essential daily reading for millions of Russians. Both enjoyed widespread use beyond Russia’s borders in the former Soviet Union. When Russian authorities set out in 2014 to win the hearts and minds of Russian-speaking populations at home and abroad and to persuade them to accept the Kremlin’s version of the conflict in Ukraine, controlling these two home-grown platforms became crucial.

The year began in confusion for VKontakte. On January 24 Pavel Durov, the primary founder, sold 12 percent of the company—his share—to a friend, Ivan Tavrin, CEO of MegaFon, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Russia, and offered odd explanations for the sale in a post on his page on VKontakte, saying that “what you own, sooner or later, owns you.” Reclusive, Durov communicated almost entirely with the outside world by posting on his page. In the same post, however, he stressed that he would remain CEO of VKontakte. “It’s my responsibility to [take] care of and protect this network,” he wrote.

VKontakte was modeled after Facebook, and Durov even chose the same fonts and colors, blue and white, for his network, but with a more primitive design. The network itself is a strange mix of contradictions: although a user is required to provide a genuine identity to register with VKontakte, the network has been famous for years as a safe haven for pirates, and many used it as a source of watching movies and listening to music for free. [1] On October 26, 2011, in a filing with the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) office, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) outlined how VKontakte and its unlicensed music service is increasingly undermining the growth of the international legitimate music marketplace. According to the RIAA’s filing, the service’s music functionality is “specifically designed to enable members to upload music and video files, hundreds of thousands of which contain unlicensed copyright works.” “RIAA Highlights Russian Service VKontakte, Others in Report to U.S. Government About Markets Rife with Music Theft,” RIAA, www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?contentselector=newsandviews&news_month_filter=10&news_year_filter=2011&id=B966B360–22F9-C11E-B7A3–50777A8122E7 . For details, see Delphine d’Amora, “Record Firms Sue Social Network VK for Piracy,” Moscow Times , April 4, 2014, www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/record-firms-sue-social-network-vk-for-piracy/497473.html ; Kathryn Dowling, “VKontakte Case Puts Russian Music Piracy into Spotlight,” BBC, August 11, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/business-28739602 ; and Martech Social, “Russian Social Network VKontakte Sparks Piracy Worries,” January 22, 2015, www.martechsocial.com/russian-social-network-vkontakte-sparks-piracy-worries . It was Russia’s most popular social network in 2012, earning over $15 million in net profit that year.