Reference Note on Russian Communications Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Reference Note on Russian Communications Surveillance

csis.org

72 pointsmikeevans31 comments

Q: "Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?”

A: Putin denied Russian mass surveillance, saying “Thank God, our special services are strictly controlled by the state and society, and their activity is regulated by law.”

===== "Putin denied..."?

He didn't deny anything.

He avoided answering the question by making generic statement about special services being controlled.

Here is a fuller quote, from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/20/snowden-s-c...

Putin’s answer was predictable. “Of course, we know that criminals and terrorists use technology for their criminal acts and of course the special services have to use technical means to respond to their crimes,” he said. “But we don’t have a mass-scale, uncontrollable efforts like that…Our special services…are strictly controlled by the society and the law, and are regulated by the law.”

I don't know where you get your info but in the translation of show I saw he said: 1)the interception is clearly regulated by russian law 2)of course they intercept communications 3)they don't do mass interception and not at the US scale and he "hopes" they will not do it in the future either 4)they don't do it like in US mostly because they don't have the technical and financial resources

So basically Russia doesn't bother pretending it's not doing domestic surveillance. They don't need to join something like a Five-eyes partnership to get around their own legal limitations. They don't need other countries hacking into their routers or tapping fiber (therefore increasing the insecurity of their domestic networks), instead they are installing their own monitoring devices, albeit at probably a much wider scale than a foreign SIGINT partner could achieve.

You may be correct that the Kremlin doesn't bother with legal ballet and literary gymnastics in the same manner that the White House does, but they are similarly blatant and tight-lipped in their activities.

However the usage of such 'black boxes' that vacuum up packets is just as prevalent in the US as it is in Russia.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/what-is-that-box-whe...

If the law says they can do it, and that's what they do, then they still have the moral upper hand over USA where the law says they can't or at least is gray area yet they still do it.

Not really. They don't have a way to change their laws. It's Putin's Russia.

Neither does the USA according to the Oligarchy Report being reported across the Western media.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/21/americas-oli...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

If that were strictly true, then SOPA would have passed.

How is the temporary shelving of SOPA proof that on over 1700 policy issues US citizens have essentially zero chance of affecting the outcome of the legislation?

As for SOPA - say hello to SOPA 2.0 http://www.uspto.gov/news/publications/copyrightgreenpaper.p...

How is that SOPA 2.0?

Try reading it. Or at least searching for the report which is commonly referred to as SOPA 2.0 by various opposition groups.

In essence however, SOPA in some form will pass and this document represents a new approach.

As someone posted before - it does not matter if it is SOPA 14.0 or SOPA 22.0 - it just needs to pass once. Very few examples of legislative repeal exist outside of social equality.

The report didn't claim the great Corporation of the Elites are omniscient and omnipotent; just that 'they' owned all Intellectual Property rights, and that We, the People, must offer remittance for air.

Agreed. It is actually a really bleak and depressing read; I am certain the UK is not much different at all.

Future dystopian writers can certainly draw upon it as a non-fiction source.

Yup. Just like South Africa had the moral upper hand because they maintained official segregation laws when in the US it was illegal by law but still a de-facto practice through social bias.

Not exactly.

Contrary to NSA story (who are known to collect data without court orders), we have no information on SORM-2 abuse at all. It's unknown whenever in absence of active court warrants those boxes are just idling on a rack dropping packets or do something they're not (legally) supposed to do.

Directly to the source: http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian-communica...

Thanks—fixed.

The original url [1] was blogspam—that is, it was a knock-off (or excerpt) of some other, more original source. In such cases HN strongly prefers the original source.

Submitters: blogspam is usually easy to recognize. Please check for that and post the original instead.

1. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/info_on_russi...

Calling Schneier "blogspam" means you don't read his blog.

You really really should.

Funny, I had a line that said "Schneier's original, substantive pieces are fine, of course" which I deleted as unnecessary. Perhaps I'll err the other way and write too much.

"Blogspam" is an attribute of an article, not an author [1]. I defined it above, and even included "or excerpt" to cover the current case.

I enjoy reading Schneier. Many of his articles are on-topic for HN. But the more lightweight ones often aren't (because there are more solid sources and we only want so many about a given topic). As for as a mere excerpt like this, there shouldn't even be a question.

None of this means these pieces aren't appropriate on Schneier's site. It's natural for his blog to be a clearinghouse for stuff he didn't write, but wants to share. Not all of it, though, is perfect for HN, where (a) the front page is space-constrained; (b) we want the most substantive pieces on a given story; (c) we prefer original sources.

1. Had I said "spamblog", you'd have had a point. :)

If a random blog did the same a Schneier here (just providing link to source and a except from the article), would this submission not be marked as blogspam?

Wait a minute - it wasn't Schneier who submitted the link, was it?

I'm not saying that either. Anyway, seems like it was seen as blogspam and the submission have been changed now.

Well we all knew that the Russians didn't care about privacy ... what was shocking about Snowden revelations is that this kind of surveillance happens in a nation that presents itself as a free country.

There's no single "Russians" entity that has a solid opinion on this matter.

Many Russians do generally care about communications privacy, many don't know a thing about how telcos work (so they're genuinely unaware on the whole matter), and many don't care about privacy as long as they're not confronted with privacy issues directly (i.e. their private conversations suddenly getting public).

Off course I was talking about the Russian government.

I guess the average Russian citizen has enough fear left from the soviet era (or the current one for that matter) to know that it would be unwise to question how the government handle surveillance.

Everyone should really be on a VPN. We built an easy way to get your own personal VPN during Sochi, but lots of people are still using it now: https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn

The interesting part about this is that the ISPs pay for it. I didn't know that. Forcing someone to pay for you to spy on them is ballsy.

VPNs do protect against rogue networks like a hacker sitting on the same open hotspot and listening for credentials.

In a more global way, unless you're fine with one high-grade adversary spying on you, but not others (i.e. good with NSA, but not so happy with FSB), VPNs don't provide any real security.

Right. I tend to trust my country with my data more than a foreign country. That may be wrong, but it's how I currently feel.

Not sure why my earlier post is being downvoted =\

* I tend to trust my country with my data more than a foreign country.*

That's probably a misguided attitude. Your own country is in a much better position to persecute you than some random foreign power.

What a news. One better ask about manufacturers of the collector and implementors of the necessary features.)

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