Anti-globalists from the FSB

The experiences of Alexander Andreechkin, head of the FSB information protection and special communications center, organically merged into the chorus of complaints from police and special services in many countries that has been growing over the past decade. The most famous...

The experiences of Alexander Andreechkin, head of the FSB information protection and special communications center, organically merged into the chorus of complaints from police and special services in many countries that has been growing over the past decade. The most famous was the statement of the German police. They drew the attention of society to a real problem: Skype conversations of criminals are not yet amenable to operational decoding. Similar views are demonstrated by their colleagues from Italy and some other states.

But you need to clearly understand that Russia and our special services in this story have a completely different role and position. While no civilized country in the world has ever banned the development and distribution of encryption algorithms and systems by specialists independent of special services, we inherited from the USSR a system that still requires citizens and enterprises to fully disclose their cryptographic developments and hardware. coding systems. That is why the Canadian RIM, which produces popular smartphones for business, was forced to disclose to the FSB its digital stream encoding algorithms: otherwise, customs would simply close the company's phones.

Hence the requirement that equipment for many communication systems with built-in information security solutions from leading Western concerns be produced only by domestic manufacturers. In everyday life, we do not see them, they are hidden in communications and servers, but, believe me, almost all of our communication today passes through them. And in the future, judging by the catastrophic picture of the domestic element base and personnel, the entire data stream, including government data, will go only through Western devices. Foreigners were forced to create in Russia, together with local partners, an assembly plant from imported components, and all this was rather shamefully called “domestic solutions”.

Having a law requiring mandatory licensing in the special services of any encryption methods, the FSB simply prohibits the import of equipment and the sale of programs by the intractable. In Russian practice, this means total control over any exchange of information without any court sanction. In extreme cases, it is easy to obtain a sanction without any clear justification: our courts are still lying, if they can be called courts at all.

For the first time on a large scale, this confrontation between the free customs of the global digital industry and Russian listeners in uniform manifested itself long ago, when the next version of the Windows operating system came out with an encryption block. The FSB threatened Bill Gates with a ban on trading in software that ran almost 100% of Russian computers. Microsoft shrugged their shoulders and removed the encryption block from the Russian version. Perhaps they laughed for a long time: anyone could download it from their website for free in a minute and a half.

But the power of officials with Soviet brains ends on the Russian border. And the internet never ends. In a way, they are just getting started. And none of us has the will over the services that are provided from servers located abroad. And it is impossible to control programs that are distributed free of charge: you can’t stop a payment, you can’t issue a fine, you can’t close an account.

There has never been a single case, to my knowledge, of Google denying the police access to Gmail by court order or prosecutor's order. This also applies to all other communication systems that the FSB information protection center complained about on Friday (in practice, it is not going to protect, but to open it). This path seems to be open to our operas. It is not known whether they will be able to work like foreign intelligence services?

In countries where it would never occur to anyone to deprive citizens of the sovereign right to encrypt their correspondence or conversations by any means, even if these algorithms are a complete secret for the special services, nevertheless, they somehow successfully catch terrorists using Skype and Gmail, and arrange high-profile public trials over them. Their secret agents work in an environment that ours never dreamed of and had nightmares about. Hotmail is not the main headache of the world's intelligence agencies. The world's drug syndicates have long since turned into giant post-industrial network-type companies that spend hundreds of millions on their information security, they hire the best specialists.

There is also a commercial component. The FSB is on a par with the lobbyists of traditional telecom companies who dream of slaughtering a free competitor. And whose order Andreyechkin actually fulfills in our country, where both mandates and shoulder straps are bought for money, is another question.

Of course, it is technically possible to block an entirely separate postal or communication service in Russia, but a competitor will soon take its place - and so on ad infinitum. Such control is beyond our power, and it is not easy for the Chinese with their fabulous resources. And if terrorists use Google products in the Caucasus, it is necessary to negotiate cooperation with the Americans, and not ban them in Russia.

The concern of foreign police officers is simply a signal to society and their government about problems in operational work. For now, nothing more. This is the main difference between the position of the same Germans and Andreechkin. He and his colleagues want to ban it.