From: William Knowles (wkC4I.ORG)
Date: Tue Feb 22 2000 - 02:45:35 CST

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http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,500171461-500220807-501048365-0,00.html

By SERGEI SHARGORODSKY

MOSCOW (February 21, 2000 9:07 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) -
The KGB's successor is now also spying on the Internet, raising fears
that the information it collects could be used for blackmail and
business espionage.

"The whole Federal Security Service will be crying tomorrow over your
love letters," warns one of the banners angry Russian Web designers
have posted on the Internet.

Russian human-rights and free-speech advocates say the security
service has already forced many of the country's 350 Internet service
providers to install surveillance equipment.

"Most Internet providers in Moscow, including all the large providers
and many in the provinces, have opened a hole" for security agents to
peep at traffic, said Anatoly Levenchuk, a Russian Internet expert.

Like its counterparts in other countries, the Federal Security Service
may argue it needs the monitoring system to catch spies, terrorists
and bandits, and to combat black-market businesses and capital flight.

But the system has raised particular alarm in Russia, where memories
of KGB surveillance and repression remain fresh. And the abundance of
secretly filmed, juicy videotapes and transcripts of telephone
conversations in Russia seems to justify the fear of blackmail by
renegade security agents or others who get hold of the information.

Free-speech activists fear that the Internet surveillance is evidence
of the security services' resurgence under acting President Vladimir
Putin, a 15-year KGB veteran. They have already accused him of
chipping away at press freedoms championed by former President Boris
Yeltsin.

Last week, a government official for the first time publicly
acknowledged the existence of the Internet control project, called the
System of Operative and Investigative Procedures or SORM-2, its
Russian acronym.

Alexei Rokotyan, the Communications Ministry's electronic
communications department chief, denied that the project was aimed at
"total control of the information that is transmitted via the global
network."

"Security organs and special forces have the right - and now the
capability - to monitor private correspondence and telephone
conversations of individual citizens according to the law," The Moscow
Times daily quoted him as saying.

Levenchuk and others said the Federal Security Service has been
quietly implementing the system at least since 1998.

"As you look at all these Orwellian things you understand it's coming
- total control, total surveillance," Levenchuk told a round table
held in St. Petersburg.

Federal Security Service officials apparently view the steps simply as
an extension of SORM regulations enacted in the mid-1990s, which allow
security agents with a warrant to tap telephones and Internet traffic.

At a series of meetings with Internet providers in 1998, security
service officials described a system that would involve a box
installed in providers' computers that would route electronic traffic
to the local security service headquarters through a high-speed link.

The project still seems a far cry from Echelon, a high-tech spying
network which, according to a European Parliament report, is
coordinated by the U.S. National Security Agency and involves "routine
and indiscriminate" monitoring of electronic communications around the
world.

But Russia's Internet freedom activists are still raising the alarm.
Levenchuk's www.libertarium.ru site is filled with accounts from
mostly provincial providers that say they were forced to install
SORM-2 equipment.

One provider in southern Volgograd, Bayard-Slavia Communications,
actually refused when security service agents sought to "receive full
and uncontrolled access to all our clients and their communications,"
its chief Nail Murzakhanov said.

Bayard-Slavia had its main communication line cut off and faced
threats of fines from government officials. But it won a court case
against the security service last fall.

Human rights advocates said Murzakhanov's confrontation with the
Federal Security Service was enough to persuade many a reluctant
provider.

But Anton Nosik, who edits the Vesti.Ru and Lenta.Ru electronic
newspapers, said the case was rare and that he was not aware of any
major providers complying with the SORM-2 directives.

Nosik was less concerned than others, saying security service agents
already have access to electronic traffic and would not be able to
monitor its ever-increasing volumes in full.

"Yet there is an unpleasant trend of security services trying to
implement non-constitutional norms," he said. "This should not be
allowed."

---------------------------------------------------
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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