With Olympics Looming, Russia Ramps Up Online Surveillance

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (L) and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Krasnaya Polyana, near Sochi, southern Russia, on February 18, 2011.

Image: Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-01-28 16:51:24 UTC

As athletes, spectators, journalists and government officials descend on Sochi for the Winter Olympics in February, they will enter what experts are calling the most surveilled Olympics of all time.

Over the past several months, we've learned — the hard way — that surveillance starts online (and not just in the United States). Internet freedom activists fear that the Russian government, along with the Federal Security Service (FSB), will use Russia's vast array of spy tech and Internet censorship to restrict Internet freedom during the Olympics.

See also: Sochi Olympians to Their Families: Stay Home, Stay Safe

The most important piece of the puzzle is Russia's system of lawful interception, which some have labeled as "Orwellian" or "PRISM on steroids." This system, which has origins in the Soviet era, allows the FSB to access Internet servers and telecommunications providers directly, allowing the government to eavesdrop on all online and phone communications that go through their networks.

The online snooping through Russia's system, called SORM (System for Operative Investigative Activities), differs from that in the U.S. In Russia, the FSB can access the servers directly, thanks to mandatory "black boxes" that companies are compelled to install in their data centers at their own cost. According to a 2012 investigation published on Wired, the FSB is directly connected to local ISPs and telecom providers with protected underground cables.

In the U.S., under the legal regime imposed by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), wiretapping is conducted indirectly: After obtaining a warrant, authorities must ask companies to tap someone's communications. They themselves do not have unfettered access to the servers.

"From the beginning, [SORM] was more totalitarian, more invasive, more flexible, and in some ways even more effective than the Western approach," said Andrei Soldatov, an independent journalist who has written extensively about Russia's surveillance powers.

This system has another "freaky" feature, Soldatov said. Although Russia's FSB has direct access at the tech level, they still must request a warrant before wiretapping an individual's communications — but they don't need to show that warrant to anyone. It's more of a formality.

SORM was born in the 1980s for the sole purpose of monitoring phone calls. Since then, the system has expanded to cover all kinds of communications. SORM-1 monitors phone and cellphone communications; SORM-2 monitors Internet traffic; and SORM-3 collects information from all sources and stores it away, as Soldatov and his colleague Irina Borogan explained in research published in the World Policy Journal in October 2013.

In the run-up to this year's Olympics, according to Soldatov and Borogan's investigations, Russia is ramping up its system, trying to combine it with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a filtering technology that has legitimate uses like stopping viruses or spam, but can also be used for censorship or surveillance. With DPI, Russian authorities could potentially monitor networks to detect the use of certain words, perhaps to anticipate the beginnings of a protests or to keep an eye on discussions involving politically controversial issues.

The implication is that all online communication at Sochi will be monitored. For Soldatov, such a scenario means that once the public and journalists are aware of the country's spying capabilities, they might restrain their actions online or what they report on.

"There might be a big deal of self-censorship as a result," he told Mashable. It's as though Russia is saying, "We're watching you, so think twice about what you're doing during the Olympics."

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), on the other hand, has already said that it will not "police the Internet" and specifically social media. The IOC has well-defined social media rules and guidelines, and for the London Olympics in 2012, many feared those rules would prove too restrictive. In the end, however, no major problems were posed.

Russia's surveillance capabilities are so powerful that the U.S. State Department issued a warning to all Americans planning to travel to Sochi: No online communications are safe.

"Business travelers should be particularly aware that trade secrets, negotiating positions, and other sensitive information may be taken and shared with competitors, counterparts, and/or Russian regulatory and legal entities," reads a document released last fall by the department's bureau of diplomatic security.

See also: The Olympics' Social Media Secret Weapon

But it's not just surveillance. Russia has powerful censorship tolls as well.

Perhaps the most well-known is the Single Register law, which was enacted on Nov. 1, 2012. The law allows the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (in Russian, simply Roskomnadzor) to put any website that it deems contains "harmful material" related to child pornography, drug abuse or suicide, on a blacklist without any judicial oversight.

Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Drug Control Service of Russia and the Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare can also request that sites be blocked. ISPs then have 24 hours to comply.

Despite its good intentions, critics claimed the law was too broad and would lead to abuse.

So far, and among many others, the blacklist includes websites of Caucasian separatists and Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as blogs on the Russian social network LiveJournal.

These examples prove that concerns were warranted. Whenever a country enacts such a law, it will be abused, argues Laura Reed, a Freedom House researcher who focuses on Russia.

"With any policy by the government to block websites you're going to end up with legitimate content being blocked as well, either because the legislation is worded in such a way that a vast amount of material can fall under the content that can be restricted, or because the way that it's implemented isn't specific enough," Reed told Mashable.

Even worse, Reed said, is that the Single Register law is not the only way to block websites. The Ministry of Justice has its own blacklist to block "extremist" websites; more recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill allowing prosecutors to block websites that promote riots or extremism without a court order.

The result, Reed concluded, is that "more Russians citizens are likely to find their communications activities under surveillance." With more than 200,000 visitors expected for the Games in Sochi next week, it won't be just Russia's citizens who will be subject to this kind of surveillance.

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Topics: Internet freedom, russia, sochi, Sports, surveillance, US & World, winter olympics, World