In the Kremlin

The results of the year. Spynomania, borders for Runet and the return of terrorist attacks

January 6, 2016 Andrey Soldatov, Irina Borogan

All last year, for the FSB, as well as for other Russian law enforcement agencies, he went under the sign #Crimeanash and a military conflict in the Donbass. First of all, this was expressed in a fit of spyingomania. The efficiency of espionage affairs has reached a record mark over the past 10 years: according to official figures, in 2015, twenty people were arrested only in Moscow. In 2014, fifteen Russians were convicted under this article.

Typically, spy affairs do not attract much attention, but the case of Svetlana Davydova, a mother of many children from Vyazma, under the influence of an emotional impulse of the Ukrainian embassy and who found herself in a Lefortovo prison, outraged many. After that, lawyers and human rights activists found out that Lefortovo contains other accused of espionage and raised noise in the press.

The reason for the new wave of spyanomania in the FSB was, apparently, the inability of the special services to supply operational information in the conditions of the crisis, despite constantly expanding powers. The FSB could not predict the Moscow protests of 2011-2012 and did not manage to influence them, as well as later on Kyiv events. Being unable to effectively respond to real challenges, the FSB increased the pressure along the counterintelligence line: after Moscow protests, the special services pushed the expanded interpretation of the article about the Stateizer, and responded to the Ukrainian crisis with a wave of spy affairs.

When the Kremlin intervened in a new international conflict, this time in Syria, this became a challenge for all the country's special services - the Islamic state prohibited in Russia immediately announced that Russia is now a goal for terrorists. And soon the explosion of a bomb on board the A321 airliner, which broke in October over the Sinai Peninsula and claimed the lives of 224 people, followed. However, the new crisis turned out to be, oddly enough, rather at the FSB’s hand.

For several years, Alexander Bortnikov personally made statements about the number of Russians who left to fight in Syria, and in 2015 this information worked for him. Unlike other Russian security forces, the director of the FSB not only did not fall under American sanctions - in February 2015 he even went at the invitation of Americans to Washington to discuss cooperation in the fight against terrorism (The New York Times , then even the director of the FBI was not invited to this meeting). In this situation, the explosion aboard the airliner only contributed to the FSB positions. Let many Russians calculate the terrorist attack for Russian interference in the Syrian conflict, and public opinion was outraged by the abolition of flights to Egyptian resorts, this did not affect the position of the FSB in the state where the security forces are outside civil control.

The responsibility for the terrorist attack took one of the units of the Islamic State, Putin promised to find terrorists anywhere in the planet, and the FSB lobbled the receipt of new powers.

In December, special services received the right to use weapons, special equipment and physical force in case of emergency and not be responsible for the harm caused to citizens and organizations. Now they are allowed to shoot in the crowd to prevent a terrorist attack, release hostages, as well as to reflect a group attack on objects of state authority.

The FSB also received the right to collect finger typos from citizens when crossing the border, if the special services have information that these people can be persuaded to terrorist activities. The law gives such a wide interpretation that in practice the border guard, if desired, can subjected a dactyloscopy of any citizen. Few doubt that soon this measure will be applied to human rights activists and opposition.

In 2015, the FSB actively participated in the large -scale attack of the Kremlin on the Internet, which is being conducted today at once by several state departments, headed by the presidential administration.

The intelligence service has always perceived the global network as a threat to the regime existing in the country and in recent years has achieved a serious expansion of its capabilities in the field of interception of information. The system of electronic interception of information (SORM) must already be installed not only by Internet providers and telecommunications operators, but also to social networks, and also store the transferred data for six months.

The Secretary of the Council of People's Commissars, Nikolai Patrushev, the former head of the FSB, in August criticized civil servants using the popular Messenger WhatsApp, as well as Google and Yahoo services. According to him, the use of resources located abroad is a serious danger. True, domestic lawmakers have already resolved this issue by adopting a law on the mandatory transfer of Internet companies with personal data of Russians to the territory of our country, as a result of which all information should become available for interception. True, it is still unknown to punish companies for failure to fulfill the law in January what Google and others will do in a new situation and whether law -abiding users can count on the fact that their correspondence will not fall into the hands of special services.

In general, the special services, together with the signalmen, have been preparing for two options for the Internet apocalypse for several years. They are developing the first scenario in case the West disconnects Russia from the Internet, which is unlikely.

The second scenario, which is much more likely in the current political conditions, that Russia itself will turn off its citizens from the Internet and block traffic coming and entering the country. This, as it turned out as a result of an experiment conducted in the spring of the outgoing year, is impossible: traffic still went abroad, and along unidentified routes - either along satellite channels, uncontrolled by the authorities, or due to the negligence of private providers who did not establish the appropriate equipment.

In principle, this is how the founding of the Internet is the worldwide web and conceived-as a network that does not have a single center, which cannot be completely suppressed by turning off the switch.

The murder of Boris Nemtsov is a few hundred meters from the Kremlin - perhaps the most vivid illustration of what Putin’s special services became in 2015: frighteningly uncontrolled, unable to find customers of political murder and ensure security to anyone outside the Kremlin walls. Kremlin walls.