Russia Is Teaching the World to Spy
Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company and the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, has helped African governments spy on political opponents. Beijing has also sold mass video surveillance to Ecuador and is advising a growing number of autocratic regimes on information management. Theres good reason to be worried about the exportation of Chinese technology.
But China isnt the only merchant offering digital surveillance tools to strongmen. It may be tempting to dismiss Russia as irrelevant in this domain, but that would be a mistake. In fact, Russias low-tech model of digital authoritarianism could prove to be more readily adaptable and enduring.
A lot more countries look more like Russia than China: resource strapped aspiring authoritarians without Great Firewalls to filter data and block content. The Chinese surveillance model rests on the principle of wholesale integration of offline and online data, linking everything from closed-circuit television footage to social media activity to medical records. This requires vast administrative resources. Few states can afford the level of investment needed to obtain them.
That may be the strength of Russias model.
At home, Russian surveillance technology relies less on mass filtering or, as is the case in China, the blocking of information before it reaches citizens and more on post-hoc monitoring, a repressive legal network and intimidation of private companies and nongovernmental organizations. Thats much easier to replicate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/russia-hacking.html
As always, Greenwald and Snowden were unavailable for comment... Funny how quiet they've been about this whole thing?
ret5hd
(20,433 posts)imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. --George Orwell
At this point I believe it is inevitable. We had a choice/chance/opportunity...and we blew it.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)dalton99a
(81,065 posts)SORM doesnt block information. Instead, it allows the security services and government agencies to access all the data that flows on the internet and on telecommunications networks. SORM basically works as a governments backdoor to the internet. It can be used to track personal details like Internet Protocol, or I.P., addresses, social media user names and the email addresses of, for example, protest leaders or opposition politicians.
Russian companies have been selling SORM-related technologies to Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and further afield to countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. MFI Soft, one of the largest SORM providers, offers a variety of packages and 24-hour customer service, and it claims a decade of experience providing equipment. One of MFI Softs most popular packages, SORMovich, can be purchased for approximately $20,000. In 2017, MFI Soft became part of a growing consortium of so-called information security companies known as the Citadel group. The move to consolidate the surveillance technology market under one umbrella holding suggests the Kremlin intends to scale up capabilities and harmonize pricing.
SORM pales in comparison with Chinas Sharp Eyes initiative, which aims to be a fully omniscient system integrating artificial intelligence and data input from video and online surveillance. Its also not secure. Recently, a Russian programmer found that SORM devices were leaking Russians personal data, including geolocation coordinates and telephone numbers. But unlike the complex Chinese vision of complete surveillance, SORM technologies are relatively easy to install and integrate with other systems.