What I'm Reading - The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote their first book, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, in 2010.  It was about the rise of the FSB in the era of Vladimir Putin from the ashes of what was once the KGB.  Five years later, they wrote second book, The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.  This book could easily have been titled The Russian Surveillance State: How Old Habits Die Hard from Soviet Times to the Present.  One would suspect from the title this book concentrates on just the Internet in post-Soviet Russia, but this book is much more.  Soldatov and Borogan document in great detail the breadth of the old Soviet KGB technical surveillance apparatus, how and where it began, and how techniques and equipment have adapted to the Internet age.

The story begins in a residential district in southwest Moscow, wherein lies a nineteen-story gray-and-white building known as Phone Station M9.  Half of Russia’s Internet traffic passes through this building.  The building has another occupant on its eighth floor – the FSB.  The FSB is the successor organization to the Soviet Committee for State Security – the KGB.  Throughout the building are little boxes marked SORM [which is an acronym for the Russian words for “operative search measures”].  These are the devices which the FSB uses to monitor Russian web traffic.  First invented by the KGB to monitor telephone calls, these SORM boxes monitor e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, cell phone calls, text messages and social networks [Twitter, Facebook, etc.].  It is with these SORM boxes the Putin regime monitors political opposition.  In 1991 Russia inherited a dysfunctional and broken communications system with barely a connection abroad, and today the Pew Research Center approximates that 73 percent of those questioned in Russia said they had online access, compared to 63 percent for China and 87 percent in the United States.  In a country of over 200 million people, that’s a lot of Internet traffic to monitor.

“Prison of information.” Soldatov and Borogan describe the old Soviet Union as a “prison of information”.  They describe the infrastructure that was put in place by the Soviet security apparatus to build this “prison of information”. 

-        Marfino [located northeast of Moscow] stood a building that was once a seminary.  During Stalin's time, this former seminary was transformed into a Soviet secret research facility.  Their mission was to create a secure telephone system for Stalin.  In 1952, while working at Marfino, Vladimir Fridkin made the Soviet Union's first working copy machine.  Three years later, the KGB smashed Fridkin’s copy machine to bits in order to prevent the copying of "prohibited materials".  Such was the paranoia of the Communist Party that they had to maintain a stranglehold on information.

-        Kuchino.  In December 1953, eighteen prisoners were transferred from Marfino to Kuchino, another security service compound twelve miles east of Moscow. It became the KGB’s main research center for surveillance technologies, including the all-pervasive Soviet system of phone tapping and communications interception. They also figured out how to intercept a human voice from the vibrations of a window. Kuchino was the main research facility for Stalin’s secret services in the area of special, or “operative,” equipment—ranging from weapons to radio sets to, most importantly, listening devices.  The engineers employed therein, and at the Scientific Research Institute of Dalny Svyazi in Leningrad, conducted much research in the field of speech recognition.

-        The Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences on Vavilova Street in Moscow applied computers to the speech recognition work.  This evolved into a private company called the Speech Technology Center in 1993.  With generous funding from the FSB, this company created technology that could to store many millions of items of biometric data, such as voice samples and photo images, and match them to individuals by searching the world’s communication channels, including video files. The voice recognition technology can identify the speaker, regardless of language, accent, or dialect, based on physical characteristics of the voice.

-        Kurchatov Institute [which included the Computation Center] held a prestigious status in the Soviet Union.  Much of the work to get the Soviet atom bomb was done here.  Additionally, it worked on other crucial defense projects, to include laser weapons and development of Soviet submarines. The Soviet Internet was born here.  It was here the Soviets made their first connection to the Internet. Alexey Saldatov, the father of one of this book’s co-authors, was a key player in making the Soviet Internet a reality.  The elder Soldatov was the head of the Computation Center.  He had done an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. During his time there, he knew of computer scientists that created a network that connected computers.  He had a team of computer programmers that adapted a bootleg copy of Unix [and called it Demos] to the Soviet’s first supercomputer with a Soviet-made copy of an IBM mainframe.  They created a local area network at Kurchatov.  Once they did that, they expanded to a larger network that connected Kurchatov and the Institute of Informatics and Automation in Leningrad, 460 miles away. After that, connections were established with research centers in Dubna, Serpukhov, and Novosibirsk. The network used ordinary telephone lines. 

Almost a year after that first global Internet connection was made, the abortive Communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place.  The Internet connection to cities outside of Moscow and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union proved extremely important because the coup plotters neglected to take down the computer network.  Large amounts of uncensored information flowed in and out of Moscow, and the coup plotters unknowingly helped the other side by demonstrating an old way of thinking, to control radio and TV.  The KGB didn’t think to censor the nascent computer network – it never occurred to them, and at this time this was a network they couldn’t control.  This is ironic because the much of the money that made the Soviet Internet a reality came from the KGB.  The ‘net’ didn’t foil the coup attempt all by itself, but it was an important new tool in the toolbox against oppression.

Russian Internet tools.  The Russian security services have quite a few tools in their Internet suppression toolkit.  Among these tools are:

-        A nationwide system of online filtering and censorship was put in place by 2012 and has since been refined.  Internet filtering in Russia is unsophisticated; thousands of sites were blocked/blacklisted by mistake, and users could easily find ways to make an end-run around it. At the same time, very few people in Russia were actually sent to jail for posting criticism of the government online.

-        Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by “hacker patriots” - when an attacker uses a multitude of infected computers to access a website at the same time, and the site often crashes as a result

-        Pro-Kremlin hacktivists and trolls were hired to attack and harass liberals online

-        SORM devices – the little black boxes control information online and obstruct a free press and political opponents.  first versions intercepted and recorded phone calls for the Soviet Union, but now Internet service providers (ISPs) install the latest generations of SORM onto Internet lines so that the FSB can intercept content (not just metadata) from email, internet traffic, mobile calls and voice-over internet such as Skype.  All Russian operators and ISPs were required to install the black boxes, about the size of an old video tape recorder, which would fit on a rack of equipment, and permit connection to the regional departments of the FSB.

-        Kompromat - compromising material released to the public to blackmail activists, embarrass opponents & business rivals, influence elections, and create confusion.  Kompromat used against journalists and others most likely came from content that SORM intercepted.

-        Coercion - The main subjects of Soldatov and Borogan’s book, online service providers including ISPs, media outlets, aggregators, mail services and social networks, are constantly angling for a position from which it is safe to conduct business. They are Putin’s willing executioners.  They are told that if they don’t provide the access to communications that the FSB desires, they won’t have the ability to do business in Russia.  The threat of being dragged into criminal proceedings – or, indeed, of losing one’s business – serves to activate what is perhaps the most commonplace survival mechanism in today’s Russia: self-censorship.

-        Blogger Law – There are many popular blogs in Russia, and is one of the few areas in cyberspace where lively and relatively free political debates take place.  This was a rewrite of anti-terrorist statutes that required blogs with 3,000 or more followers to register with the government.  This registration gave security services a way to track bloggers, intimidate them, or close them down. 

Face recognition software – The Russians, through a company called Ladakom-Service, have developed facial recognition software, and have been using it wherever there are gatherings of large numbers of people, whether they are sporting events or at the Russian subways.  At the entrance to sporting events, spectators go through metal detectors, ostensibly in efforts to find weapons.   While the spectators are patted down by security, their pictures are taken.  The cameras rapidly capture each face into a green digital frame and then identify different characteristics of the face, including such distinctive features as distance between the eyes. A computer connected to the camera then evaluated each person based on a complex algorithm, and within seconds the person’s name was established and they were given a unique number. Near the metal detectors sits an operator with a laptop.  He monitors every face closely. One window on his screen shows the live camera acquiring the face images, another part of the screen shows the captured images, and a program was constantly running to match the captured images with people in a government passport database, one of the biggest in the country. When the match was successful, a photograph just taken appeared along the bottom of the screen with the person’s full identity.  The same company in 2011 had installed this technology in the entrance hall of one of the busiest metro stations in the city. As people stepped on the subway escalator, their faces entered a frame and were captured by video cameras. The images are rapidly linked to their identity in security service databases. There was no notification to anyone that they were being recorded. The system is so advanced that a scan of 10 million images would take no more than seven seconds. The facial images and video are sent to the Metro system’s situation room, the Interior and Emergencies Ministries, and to the FSB. 

Putin’s “Willing Executioners”.  The authors point out that engineers in Soviet Union [and today’s Russia] are not trained in ethics like medical doctors are.  They were taught to be servants of the state.  These engineers were focused on the technical needs of the Soviet Union, and they did not [and still do not] question the uses of their technical creations in service to the state.  These people are much more comfortable being told what to do without question – they have a much better understanding of the mechanical world than “the often-unruly reality of freedom”.  They have little or no understanding of politics.  The authors questioned one such engineer named Sergei Koval.  When questioned about what he thought about regimes around the world using his technology to suppress dissent.  His reply - “All this talk about technology catching dissidents is just bullshit.  It’s typical of the kind of psychological warfare the Americans use against their opponents. I think all these arguments about human rights are completely hypocritical.  We just come up with the hardware. It’s just technology that is developed with law enforcement in mind. Sure, you can use it against the good guys just as easily as you can use it against the bad guys. One way or another, these governments will be able to use surveillance technology, whether we supply it or not.… If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!”

Who are the “hacker patriots” and Putin’s on-line trolls?  During the 2000s the Kremlin had created large pro-Kremlin youth organizations, which mostly consisted of youth recruited in Russia’s regions. Two of the most important organizations were Nashi (“Ours”), the oldest movement, built up under direct guidance of Surkov, and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”), the youth wing of the pro-Kremlin political party United Russia.  These people aren’t government employees, hence the Kremlin’s ability to maintain the façade of “plausible deniability” whenever they are accused of stirring up trouble.  A Ukrainian hacktivist group named CyberBerkut, which consisted of supporters of the country’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled to Russia after the Maidan forced him from office, claimed to have hacked the email accounts of Ukrainian NGOs.  They “obtained” emails from Ukrainian NGOs to “prove” that the targeted NGOs were not only in touch with the US Embassy but also received funding from American foundations.

“Digital Sovereignty”.  In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the practices at NSA, an idea sprang from the Russian State Duma.  The idea was that meant Russian citizens should be forbidden from keeping their personal data on foreign servers.  The pretext of this “fear” of the surrender of Russian citizens’ data to American intelligence agencies.  In order to keep that from happening, the Kremlin wanted Facebook, Google’s services, Twitter, Gmail, and YouTube to have their computer servers on Russian soil.  What this really means is that once the servers of these social media are on Russian soil, the Russian security services can put in their own internet controls.  They wanted the SORM boxes installed on these social media services.  Since 2011 the FSB complained they had no way to chat messages and emails on Facebook and Gmail.  “Digital sovereignty” was their ticket to access.  According to the authors, the Russian government announced in March 2015 that Google had indeed located servers in Moscow.

The Panama Papers.  In 2016 the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which consists of reporters based all over Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Azerbaijan to Romania to Ukraine to Russia, had gotten their hands on an extensive trove of documents detailing offshore Panamanian companies that government officials and oligarchs all over the world—Russians included—used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.  The Russian journalists identified multi-million-dollar accounts owned by Sergei Roldugin, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin.  Putin saw the publication of the Panama Papers as a personal attack on him funded by the United States Agency for International Development [USAID].  The Russians, especially Vladimir Putin, thinks of USAID as a CIA front organization that plots to undermine the Putin regime.  WikiLeaks claimed the OCCRP targets Russia and other former Soviet countries and is paid by USAID and George Soros.

The Bolotnaya protests.  In 2008, Vladimir Putin was constitutionally ineligible to serve a third consecutive term as Russian president.    Putin sidestepped this constitutional inconvenience by having Dmitri Medvedev [Russia First Deputy Prime Minister] run in his place.  Medvedev appointed Putin as Prime Minister.  Medvedev was/is Putin’s puppet.  In September 2011, Medvedev announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and endorsed Putin as his successor.  Many people in Russia were disappointed at this turn of events.  There wasn’t great love for Medvedev since he was part of Putin’s United Russia machine.  The disappointment came in that this decision [“the castling”] was made by two men behind closed doors.  The Russian electorate wouldn’t get the chance to make a decision between Putin or Medvedev.  These people saw this development as a lost chance for thaw, liberalization, or democratization, modernization.  

Parliamentary elections took place in December 2011.  An organization named Golos is the only independent election watchdog organization in Russia, and Golos uncovered voting fraud in the parliamentary elections.  The method exposed is known as “carousel voting”.  Voters of United Russia [Putin’s political party] would go from polling station to polling station and stuff ballot boxes.  These people were given false identity papers so they could vote at different polling places, and they had ballots marked for United Russia.  In different parts of the country, election observers reported results that exceeded 100 percent. The same people who were angered by Medvedev being dumped were further angered by the exposed vote fraud.  On December 10, fifty thousand protesters against election fraud gathered on Bolotnaya Island in Moscow.  The protests were mobilized by Twitter and Facebook, technology made in the West.  It was a nightmare for Vladimir Putin.  In his worldview, everything is vertical – organized from the top down.  There’s always [in his view] a “boss” to reach out and crush when things become inconvenient.  But these protests were united by horizontal methods [think “whack-a-mole”].  Putin can whack a lot of moles, but he can’t get them all.

The 2016 Election.  Putin believed Hillary Clinton had been a driving force behind the Bolotnaya protests in December 2011. He also believed that she and her people at the US State Department were behind most of the Western anti-Russian moves—from the US sanctions, to the activities of the Russian opposition, to journalistic investigations exposing corruption in Russia [specifically the Panama Papers].  The authors listed instances where Russia used cyber warfare against in-country dissidents, Kremlin “enemies” in former Soviet states, and other countries they see as opposed to Russian interests [France, Germany].  The authors see the Russian meddling in the 2016 as “our turn” to get a taste of Russian statecraft.   Unlike the Chinese [whose government directly supervises cyberattacks], the Kremlin uses all kinds of informal actors for plausible deniability - from patriotic hackers, to Kremlin-funded youth movement activists, to employees of cybersecurity companies forced into cooperation by government officials.  The authors briefly discuss the actions of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, and the havoc these groups created inside the Democratic National Committee.

Disruptive tactics.

-        The use of rank-and-file hacktivists not directly connected to the state in order to help the Kremlin maintain plausible deniability;

-        Guidance and protection from criminal prosecution, provided by the president’s administration alongside the secret services;

-        Hacked information was published as kompromat (i.e., compromising materials) online as a way of smearing an opponent.

One has to listen to Putin’s words [and those of his spokesman Dmitry Peskov] very carefully, because they are very adept at parsing words. When they emphasize that no Russian government bodies were involved in hacktivist activities, they have some plausible deniability.  The Russian government isn’t directly involved in these activities.  The Russian government outsources these activities to informal actors—hackers’ groups and companies.  One thing the Russians didn’t count on was that in May 2016, that the cyber expert community is now able to deduce the sources of cyberattacks, including those made by Russia. If an attack could be attributed to a hacking group with a known history of attacking similar targets and this group’s attacks consistently worked to benefit one particular country, cyberattack investigators put two and two together and make a conclusion.  After the Russians were expelled from the DNC computers, they went on to the next step – kompromat.  They released the Democrats’ dirty laundry, as provided to them by WikiLeaks.  The “laundry” that was released is documented here, as it was in newspapers across this country.

Why did WikiLeaks side with the Russians?  The arrangement was mutually beneficial.  In return for WikiLeaks doing the Russians’ dirty work in digging up dirt on the Democrats and helping disrupt the 2016 campaign, the Russians allowed WikiLeaks to re-locate their servers to Russia.  Perhaps this was WikiLeaks way of protecting their own operations from Western snooping-interference-penetration [pick your favorite verb, it’ll fit].

Putin’s Gift.  Vladimir Putin’s gift to the US was cynicism.  He grew up in the Soviet era where officials never trusted the people.  People are unreliable who need to be managed and controlled.  Putin and those like him think that people can’t come together voluntarily to do something for the common good.  People who try to do something not directed by the government – his government -  are corrupted by either foreign governments wishing to do Russia harm, or are corrupted by corporations [greed].  Nobody is to be trusted.  Large sections of America distrust government and the media, and the Russians exploited the distrust.  Russian trolls on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.  Despite the Russian efforts against Clinton [and all the dirt they found], the authors characterized the election thusly:

“The Russian hackers did not compromise polling stations, nor did they affect the critical infrastructure of the United States during the presidential campaign. Donald Trump found himself in the White House for a number of very serious reasons, most of them originating in the United States, not from abroad.”

While the US electoral infrastructure was not compromised, what was compromised was trust – trust in media, trust in politicians [which wasn’t high to begin with].  The Russians exploited weaknesses in the American system that were already there.  In an article published last week on the website Project Syndicate, former CIA analyst Kent Harrington wrote that Russia was able to “stoke discord along economic, racial, and political lines” by inundating Google and Facebook with automated messages from tens of thousands of user accounts.  And Harrington also attributes the gullibility of the American body politic to civic illiteracy.  The hacker patriots and Putin’s online trolls described by Soldatov and Borogan created English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.  Harrington attributes the lack of civics education in American schools to a decline in the public’s understanding of issues and the political process, and made them susceptible to disinformation, what is now referred to as “fake news”.

In the authors’ view, though, not all hope is lost.  The Russians have many technical means at their disposal to control political thought.  Putin’s people can coerce their opponents, jail them, smear them, harass them, monitor them, and sometimes kill them.  But Putin’s worldview of a vertical power structure inhibits his regime’s ability to control the Internet in Russia because Internet content isn’t generated by the owners of websites and social media.  Internet content is generated by the users, and anyone with a laptop or a cellphone can participate.  As much as he would like it to be so, Vladimir Putin can’t be everywhere.  He would have to control the mind of every single Internet user, which is not possible.  As a final example of Putin’s inability to control information, the authors cite the “little green men” in Ukraine.  Russian conscript soldiers serving in Ukraine are doing more damage than Western media in exposing Putin’s lies about Russian meddling in Ukraine.  These soldiers are doing so by merely posting images they themselves took in Ukraine.  The Internet enabled these soldiers to do so.  If Putin can’t control his own soldiers, who can he control?