In uniform

SORM: FSB requires new powers

November 7, 2013 Andrey Soldatov

One of the largest telecommunication operators of the country, Vimpelcom, criticized the legal interception system of telephone conversations and correspondence, and this was a shock for observers. Vimpelcom sent a letter to the Ministry of Communications with criticizing the draft order, which establishes requirements for the legal interception system of Internet traffic.

Nevertheless, this document does not fundamentally change the system of legal interception of information in Russia in Russia for fifteen years. Initially, it is arranged in such a way as to avoid any control. Its principles were laid and implemented back in 1990, and since then this kind of orders have been issued once every few years, updating the requirements for operators in accordance with the development of technology and the growing appetites of the Russian special services.

For example, the new version of the order requires operators and Internet providers to provide special services with the opportunity to intercept Gmail.com and Yahoo.com and even instant ICQ services, as well as store information for interception for 12 hours. These requirements, of course, are expanding the possibilities of surveillance - they indicate that the FSB is now going to read messages of Western postal services, servers that are physically located outside the country, as well as intercept Gmail mail, which is by default in the protected HTTPS mode, which cannot be intercepted by ordinary means, unless the special services have provided Backdoor into the system.

The growing ambitions of the FSB in the field of wiretaps are not news, as evidenced by the two -time growth in the interception of telephone conversations and emails over the past six years: from 265 937 in 2007 to 539 864 in 2012. It is not news that other Russian special services also gained access to the national interception system of telecommunications SORM.

In recent years, their systems of legal interception of telecommunications in Russia are building, following the FSB, the Federal Service for Control over the illegal Training of Drugs (FSKN), the Ministry of Internal Affairs and even the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN).

At the same time, the Russian legal interception system is technically arranged in such a way as to avoid any control. For which the NSA had to create programs of the PRISM type, in the Russian system of legal interception existed immediately - the SORM is originally arranged in such a way that the special service gains access to traffic without the knowledge of the operator or provider remotely. To do this, the headquarters of the special services posts the control point that is connected with the black box of the SORM, installed by the provider, whose employees do not have access to this equipment. By operating the management point, an intelligence officer can listen to any user, intercept his email, chats, etc.

The existence of such control points is already considered granted - namely, the presence of such points at the NSA has become one of the main reasons for criticizing the American special services after Snowden's revelations, as the distance interception of traffic allows without the knowledge of the provider.

Meanwhile, for many years all this did not cause a murmur at the industry: the last time the Russian Internet providers were outraged by how wiretapping was arranged in Russia, exactly fifteen years ago-in the summer of 1998, when the first draft order on organizing surveillance on the Internet was published. However, then the indignation of the providers caused not an attack on the rights of Russian citizens, but the fact that they were obliged to pay for the equipment of SORM.

Today, it seems that the indignation of the giants of the telecommunication industry caused not only additional expenses (the new rules of the Ministry of Communications require the purchase of additional equipment). In a letter to Vimpelcom, he directly claims that some provisions of the draft order contradict the Constitution, which protects the right of citizens to the secret of correspondence.

Of course, it cannot be excluded that the exposure of Snowden played their role in the mobilization of public opinion around the topic of electronic wiretap. However, it is possible that the attack on the secret of private life on the Internet has been going on recently so quickly that it has even frightened the telecommunication business.

On the same day, when it became known about the letter of Vimpelcom, another department demanded the right to intercept information. And this, oddly enough, is not a special service, but a central bank. He prepared amendments to the law on an inside, which should provide the Central Bank access to telephone conversations and correspondence of potentially unscrupulous market participants, although the Central Bank is neither a special service nor law enforcement.

It is known that the Central Bank is already actively working with postal services: the Central Bank has already managed to finish the two largest postal services in the country - Rambler.ru and Mail.ru - for refusing to provide data from the court without a court decision. According to the Central Bank, the information about to whom the user sent letters and when does not violate the secret of correspondence, although the company claims that it is technically impossible to get this data without opening a message.

As a result, as they say now in these companies, the Central Bank’s desire to gain access to electronic correspondence, backed up by impressive fines, provokes other state departments far from the fight against terrorism or crime, write requests to their company, demanding the data of their customers, and all this without sanction.

Meanwhile, in the country there are eight law enforcement agencies that have the right to read other people's letters according to the law. Obviously, the key question is now - how many of them will be in a year?


In the photo: in the office of the telecommunications company Vimpelcom.

Photo by ITAR-TASS/ Vitaly Belousov