Roskomnadzor Has Become Putin’s Personal Powerful Surveillance Network

Privacy

from the regulatory-thugs dept

Russia’s Roskomnadzor never used to be a powerful government thug. It used to be almost nothing at all. It was an afterthought — a regulatory agency created to cover things hardly anyone considered to be important. It was formed in 2008 and asked to oversee radio signals, telecom, and the Russian mail service.

But then it was told to oversee the internet. And its power has grown as Vladimir Putin’s power has grown, morphing from a forgotten bureaucracy composed of a few dozen employees to a behemoth capable of shutting down the internet and controlling Russian internet communications.

The New York Times has obtained 160,000 pages of leaked documents detailing Roskomnadzor’s activities from transparency activist group, DDoSecrets. They show just how powerful the regulatory agency has become, both in terms of internet oversight and as a weapon to be deployed in Putin’s never ending propaganda campaigns.

The agency’s role in this digital dragnet is more extensive than previously known, according to the records. It has morphed over the years from a sleepy telecom regulator into a full-blown intelligence agency, closely monitoring websites, social media and news outlets, and labeling them as “pro-government,” “anti-government” or “apolitical.”

Roskomnadzor has also worked to unmask and surveil people behind anti-government accounts and provided detailed information on critics’ online activities to security agencies, according to the documents. That has supplemented real-world actions, with those surveilled coming under attack for speaking out online. Some have then been arrested by the police and held for months. Others have fled Russia for fear of prosecution.

Roskomnadzor is Putin’s personal army. While his actual army is deployed in an effort to turn Ukraine into just another Eastern Bloc country, his telecom regulator is fighting the war at home, shutting down dissent and ensuring promotion of the party line.

One way the agency achieves its aim is the installation of hardware. Documents show Roskomnadzor mandated installation of “censorship boxes” by local internet providers. These devices allowed the Russian government to become the man-in-the-middle when public sentiment turned against it, giving it the power to throttle services utilized by government critics. They also allow the government to pull the plug on services whenever it deems it necessary. Twitter access has been repeatedly throttled. The agency has also completely blocked access to Facebook and Instagram and ensured VPN services are unusable by Russian citizens.

It’s also a surveillance agency, according to the documents obtained and leaked by DDofSecrets.

Just in Bashkortostan, an oil-rich region with about 4 million residents, Roskomnadzor tracked the online activities of hundreds of people and organizations. It gathered information about government critics and identified shifting political opinions on social media. It compiled dossiers on independent media outlets and online influencers who shared information unfavorable to the government that might gain traction with the Russian public.

Roskomnadzor is an authoritarian Swiss Army knife. Whatever the government needs it to do, it can do, thanks to its insertion into every part of Russian communications. Enacted laws may theoretically restrain Roskomnadzor’s actions, but reality (and leaked documents) show it answers only to the dictates of Putin and his supporters, no matter what the law actually says. There is no oversight to answer to other than Putin himself.

In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet. They monitored overtly political videos and, at other times, focused on less obviously worrisome content, like this viral song by the young rapper KEML. Bashkortostan is known as a hub for rap in Russia.

Roskomnadzor also helped Mr. Putin centralize power far from Moscow. The regional office in Bashkortostan only shared a fraction of its work with the local government, according to one document. Many reports were instead sent straight to the F.S.B. and other central agencies.

It’s an internet regulator that acts like a spy agency and communicates directly with an actual spy agency. Russian citizens are the targets. The Russian state has steadily moved towards the Big Brother ideal of the former Soviet Union, which turned neighbor against neighbor with the assistance of the KGB. The new, supposedly freer Russian state is now indistinguishable from the one that erected the Berlin Wall, thanks to Putin and Roskomnadzor. All it’s missing is the land mass. Cue the invasion of Ukraine.

In the first weeks of the war on Ukraine, Roskomnadzor censors ramped up, according to the documents. They focused not just on the war but its side effects, including the public response to a domestic crackdown on dissent and grumblings about the invasion’s effect on the rising cost of goods.

On Feb. 27, agency officials monitored the reaction to reports that a family from Ufa — including young children — was detained for protesting the war. Another report flagged an item that was spreading quickly online that described how the F.S.B. brutally beat and electrocuted a protester.

“Some users negatively assessed the actions of law enforcement agencies,” they wrote, noting 200,000 users had viewed the news on the messaging app Telegram.

Everything that’s of interest to the government becomes part of a dossier. Public sentiment is gauged. Targets for surveillance and/or prosecution are determined. Government officials are advised. Operatives are put to work countering negative perception. Anything not viewed as useful or innocuous is censored. All of this is done by an agency that was created to keep an eye on snail mail.

What’s detailed in the New York Times report is astounding. Even more astounding is the fact that this leak only covers the actions of one regional Roskomnadzor office. This is happening all over the country, and is likely performed with even more alacrity and intensity by offices located in the country’s capital.

The Russian government has re-perfected narrative control and countrywide censorship under Putin. And it has a massive, well-oiled apparatus to ensure the government achieves its ends. This leak exposes the inner workings of this machinery. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to embarrass the Putin regime from dialing back the censorial thuggery. Some governments simply have no shame.

Filed Under: roskomnadzor, rozkomnadzor, russia, surveillance, ukraine, vladimir putin