The Russian state and surveillance technology

By Dilip -
The Russian blogosphere has burgeoned into a open-door sanctuary for all strands of political opinion. Predictably, it has also attracted the attention of the country's security services. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov present the first in a series of investigations outlining how the Russian state is now monitoring its online public...


Russia’s Internet has lived through several rows connected with the so-called System for Operative Investigative Activities, which enables the tapping and interception of Internet traffic. At the end of the 90s, ISPs complained that they were forced to buy equipment for this system with their own money, and in the 2000s activists demanded that the Ministry of Communications insist on the security services showing ISPs a court order sanctioning Internet traffic interception. This battle ended with the complete routing of the activists, and today the security services have the right not only to access the providers’ channels without a court order, but to do it remotely...


On 1st October 2011 the Italian journal ‘Internazionale’’s festival in Ferrara was addressed by the well known Chinese journalist and blogger Jing Zhao (also known as Michael Anti), who is famous for the fact that in 2005 Microsoft deleted his blog. When Anti was asked to describe the situation in China, he summed it up in a few words.

‘Instead of Facebook we have XiaoNei, and instead of Twitter, Weibo. The usual policy in China for introducing Internet technology is to allow people to use a new product just until a Chinese equivalent is developed. So now Facebook is banned, and so is Twitter. And the servers for the Chinese versions are in Beijing.’

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