Telephone Surveillance in Russia: The Agent Is Eavesdropping

“We know that criminals and terrorists use technology for their criminal acts, and of course special services have to use technical means to respond to their crimes, including those of terrorist nature,” Vladimir Putin answered on TV to the question posed by Edward Snowden via video link. Russian law forbids mass surveillance, and “we don’t have these technical devices that they have in the [United] States.”

However, what Putin does not mention is a program called SORM that was introduced by the Soviet secret service — the KGB — in the mid-1980s and has been continuously developed since its introduction to monitor telephone conversations. Since then, SORM-3 has been capable not only of recording telephone and Internet communication, but also of storing the data for many years, reports the journalist Andrei Soldatov, who has been writing about the activities of the intelligence services for a number of years.

Telecom firms and Internet providers in Russia are obligated to install the SORM technology and must allow the FSB to access the data at any time. As in Germany, the secret service [of Russia] requires the permission of a judge to carry out surveillance; however, the snoopers are not required to submit this permit to anyone other than their own supervisor. The telecom provider, therefore, knows nothing of this action.

Russia’s Secret Service Is Spying on Its Own People

According to Andrei Soldatov, the surveillance system was reconstructed on the basis of public contracts for surveillance technology and was also upgraded in other states of the former Soviet Union with assistance from Russia. According to the journalist, this happened in Ukraine around 2010. A major difference in the efforts of the Americans is historically conditioned: Because the U.S. is the motherland of the Internet, the global data traffic converges there. Therefore, the NSA can eavesdrop on the whole world a lot more easily, whereas the mistrust of Russia’s secret service toward its people has existed since the Soviet era.

This means that politicians, authorities and courts interpret the term “extremism” according to different requirements. Numerous websites have been blocked on the grounds that the operators were invoking unapproved protests. This week, Pavel Durov, the founder of the Russian Facebook clone VK (originally called VKontakte) published a letter from the FSB in which he was requested to make known the founders of all the Ukrainian groups that supported the Maidan demonstrations.