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[infowar.de] russische Internetkontrolle durch Geheimdienste
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Washington Post, 7.3.2002
Russian Spies, They've Got Mail
By Sharon LaFraniere
MOSCOW -- Nail Murzakhanov, an Internet provider in Volgograd, knew he
might
lose his business license four years ago when he told the Federal
Security
Service, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, that he would not give
it
access to the e-mail traffic of his 1,500 subscribers.
When the Communications Ministry suspended his license for failure to
cooperate with the intelligence agency, known as the FSB, Murzakhanov
filed
suit.
Surprisingly, in August 2000, he got his license back. "In the end, I
was
left in peace," he said in a phone call from an office filled with
brightly
colored computer games.
The standoff was surprising not so much because Murzakhanov won, but
because
it occurred at all. Typically, Internet providers in Russia say they do
all
they can to satisfy the state security services, even if it means
turning
over the password of every client.
That is one telling barometer of the security services' continuing power
in
Russia's 11-year-old democracy. In theory, Russians are entitled to as
much
privacy in their communications as Americans. Both the Russian
constitution
and a 1995 law prohibit law enforcement agencies from monitoring phone
calls, pager messages, radio transmissions, e-mails or Internet traffic
without a court order.
But in practice, critics say, court orders are little more than legal
niceties in Russia. An obscure set of technical regulations issued in
the
late 1990s permits total access without ever approaching a judge.
The regulations are known as SORM, the Russian acronym for System for
Operational-Investigative Activities. They require Internet providers to
give their local FSB office whatever hardware, software and fiber-optic
lines may be needed to tap into the provider's system and all its users.
While U.S. law is based on the premise that law enforcement agencies
must be
held in check, Russian civil rights advocates say the premise of SORM is
that Russian law enforcement can be trusted to keep itself in check.
"They have all the conditions to abuse their power," said Yuri Vdovin,
who
heads Citizens' Watch, a St. Petersburg human rights organization funded
by
the Ford Foundation. "The system is on purpose constructed in such a way
that there is no way anyone can control them. A Russian citizen is not
protected at all."
Internet providers don't like the system, especially since they promise
clients in their contracts that their e-mail will be kept confidential.
But
a decade after perestroika, Russia is still a country where people are
not
inclined to fight city hall, much less what was once the secret police.
Eugene Prygoff is the former marketing director of Kuban.net., an
Internet
provider in the southwestern Russia city of Krasnodar. He said the vast
majority of providers are simply not willing to risk their licenses to
test
the principle of privacy. "They see no sense in putting up resistance.
So
they work out a deal with the FSB," he said.
And compared with their counterparts in the West, civil rights
organizations
are still scarce and often too weak to challenge the state. Citizens'
Watch,
for instance, is working with a group of Russian lawyers to prepare a
legal
complaint against SORM. At the same time, the group's 12 employees are
working on issues of freedom of the press, racial discrimination,
juvenile
crime, military reform and state secrecy.
Not every provider ends up installing a direct line to the local FSB
office,
according to Mikhail Yakushev, head of the legal department at Global
One,
an international firm andone of Moscow's biggest Internet providers.
Each
one works out its own confidential agreement with the security service,
he
said. He stressed that his comments reflected the views of an Internet
providers association, where he heads the legal working group, not
Global
One.
"In practice SORM is not as abusive as it could be, because the FSB
doesn't
have enough qualified staff or special equipment to be as active as they
could," he said.
"But then again, who knows what will happen next year, or next month?
The
biggest problem is no one to control them. If there is a line, and
equipment
that allows them access, then no one can track them."
Until a Supreme Court ruling in late 2000, the FSB was not even required
to
tell providers that its agents were tapping the system. The complaint in
that case was filed by a 26-year-old St. Petersburg journalist, who said
he
got tired of waiting for civil rights groups or providers to protest.
Murzakhanov, now 36 and the director of Bayard-Slavia Communications in
Volgograd, 575 miles south of Moscow, is the only provider to publicly
raise
a fuss. Murzakhanov said that in 1998, a year after the company opened,
FSB
agents presented the firm with a plan to hook up the local FSB offices.
Besides $100,000 worth of hardware, software and computer lines,
Murzakhanov
said, the FSB wanted all the tools that he had, as the administrator of
the
system. "They could very easily have read all the clients' passwords.
And
once they learned the passwords, they could have controlled online all
the
e-mail traffic," he said. "They could have read or rewritten an e-mail
even
before the receiver got it, and the user would never know."
His refusal to sign the FSB's plan brought untold headaches. He said his
business was audited or inspected at least 15 times for compliance with
fire, epidemiological, sanitation, labor protection and tax codes.
The FSB also switched off his main data transmission line, he said,
forcing
him to rely on low-quality, dial-up channels. His business license was
suspended for six months. Only after Communications Ministry officials
failed to show up for four court hearings did he recover it.
Murzakhanov said the ministry deliberately punted. "They didn't want to
expose the entire system of pressuring providers. They decided it was
better
to lose and to keep the cover on the system."
So far, no other provider is eager to follow the Volgograd example, said
Anatoly Levenchuk, an Internet expert in Moscow who first revealed the
SORM
requirements.
"They all say his case shows all the trouble you can have if you try to
oppose the authorities," he said.
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