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Russian security services involvement in internet warfare is a conspiracy theory that claims Russian security services are involved in a variety of "active measures" to influence the world events, including denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, dissemination of disinformation over the internet, participation of state-sponsored teams in political blogs, internet surveillance using SORM technology, and persecution of cyber-dissidents. According to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov ^[1], some of these activities are coordinated by the Russian signals intelligence, which is currently a part of the FSB but has been formerly a part of 16th KGB department, but others are directed by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Sergei Tretyakov confessions

US author Pete Earley described his interviews with former senior Russian intelligence officer Sergei Tretyakov who defected in the United States in 2000. According to him,

.

Tretyakov did not specify the targeted web sites, but claimed they selected the sites which are most convenient for distributing the specific disinformation. During his work in New York in the end of 1990s, one of the most frequent disinformation subjects was the Second Chechen War.

According to Soldatov, the group of people, who claimed they are GRU employees, published information on military progress of the US invasion of Iraq on a web-site publishing news about the campaign.^[1].

Cyber warfare during Estonian Bronze night, and the 2008 South Ossetia war

It has been claimed that Russian security services organized a number of denial of service attacks as a part of their Cyber-warfare against other countries^[3], most notably 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia and 2008 cyberattacks on Russia, South Ossetia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan [4]. One of young Russian hackers said that he was paid by the Russian state security services to lead the hacker attacks on NATO computers. He was majoring computer sciences at the Department of the Defense of Information. His tuition was paid by the FSB^[4]

At the same time, speaking of 2007 cyberattacks, Estonia's defence minister Jaak Aaviksoo admitted he does not possess evidence of Russian involvement in cyberattacks.^[5]

As to the 2008 cyberattacks on Georgia, an independent US-based research institute US Cyber Consequences Unit report stated the attacks had "little or no direct involvement from the Russian government or military". According to the institute's conclusions, some severalattacks were carried from PCs of multiple users, located in Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. These people were willingly participating in cyberwarfare, being Russia supporters during 2008 South Ossetia war. Some attacks also used botnets. ^[6][7]

According to Soldatov, a hacker attack on his web site Agentura was apparently directed by the secret services in the middle of Moscow theater hostage crisis^[1].

A talk show with Andrei Soldatov on Echo Moskvy station on control over the Internet

In 2006 radio talk show hosted by Yevgenia Albats with a topic "Control over the Internet: How does that happen?", Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov made the following points^[8]:

• There are countries with greater or less control over the Internet; but there is control over the Internet in Russia;
• During the US invasion of Iraq, a group of people calling themselves GRU officers published allegedly internal GRU information on American losses in Iraq — this information was shown on the background of Anti-American hysteria and was well consumed. Later it turned out this information was not credible, but this effectively didn't change the result;
• After 2005 Nalchik raid Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement that Kavkaz Center "is a very bad resource", and after two days two teams calling themselves hackers appeared, to arrange hacker attacks against Kavkaz Center;
• Soldatov doesn't think web brigades are fiction. He had related issues with his own site, especially during such events like Moscow theater hostage crisis;
• One of structures having related business with the Internet is signals intelligence, which is currently a part of the FSB and has been formerly a part of 16th KGB department;
• There is a related agency in Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs with competent people who can do such things.^[8]

Other participant of the talk show, Russian political scientist Marat Gelman made the following points:

• There are countries with control over the Internet, there's none in Russia; there may be control understood as observation, but there's no tool to forbid any certain resource;
• Internet is good as the space where authorities and opposition are placed in absolutely equal conditions and they need to actually struggle and convince people. It's impossible to actually prohibit in the Internet, one needs to win [a game];
• Professional activity exists for long in the Internet — as many sites are professional media-structures with a team and owners perhaps — in a way a newspaper is. And coordinated work of these resources is possible. Commenting on a possibility that besides open structures there are closed ones imitating activity of youths, Gelman said he had an exact feeling it's fake;
• Answering Albats' question about possibilities of control over Internet as a means to exert influence on youths, Gelman asserted that authorities, opposition and America are all equal players in question of control and attempts of influence. Unlike e.g. television or newspapers all players in the Internet have equal possibilities, every player tries to do one's sort of work;
• Answering Albats' question "How control over Internet is technically organized?", Gelman noted that there are two major concepts: either the information is filtered before an user may access it ("premoderation"), either "postmoderation". While the first is the case in China, where access to certain types of resources is physically blocked, Gelman considers it a bad practice and it is absolutely unacceptable for Russia. Gelman thinks there must be control over the Internet in Russia, but only in the form of an agency searching for criminals in the Internet, tracking their IPs to get personal information, as well as there must be a mechanism to impose a penalty on such people.^[8]

Court case against the blogger Vladimir Rakhmankov

• When Russian president Vladimir Putin called on his nation's women to have more children, journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov published a satiric article on the Internet calling Putin "the nation's phallic symbol". Rakhmankov was found guilty of offending Vladimir Putin by regional court, and fined to the sum of 20,000 roubles (about 680 USD).^{[9][10][11][12][13]} Rakhmanov didn't plead guilty; actions of prosecutors lead a number of Russian and international newspapers to republish Rakhmanov's article. ^[9]

An article by Anna Polyanskaya, Andrey Krivov, and Ivan Lomako on web brigades

The appearance of Russian state security teams in RuNet was described in 2003 by journalist Anna Polyanskaya ^[14] (a former assistant to assassinated Russian politician Galina Starovoitova^[15]), historian Andrey Krivov and political activist Ivan Lomako. They claimed the appearance of organized and fairly professional "brigades", composed of ideologically and methodologically identical personalities, who were working in practically every popular liberal and pro-democracy Internet forums and Internet newspapers of RuNet.^[16].

Description of web brigades behavior in the article

According to Polyanskaya and her colleagues, the behavior of people from the Internet brigades has distinct features, some of which are the following:^[16][17]

• Propaganda of the Communist ideology, and constant attempts to present in a positive light the entire history of Russia and the Soviet Union, minimizing the number of people who died in repressions.
• Boundless loyalty to Vladimir Putin and his circle.
• Respect and admiration for the KGB and FSB. The key word which "will force them to reveal their true colors is lustration"; the brigade will cry out in a choir about "bloody repressions by democratic murderers" and "witch hunts" after mentioning this word.
• Hatred of dissidents and human rights organizations and activists, political prisoners and journalists, especially Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Kovalev, Elena Bonner, Grigory Pasko, Victor Shenderovich, and Valeria Novodvorskaya.
• Anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism.
• Accusation of Russophobia against everyone who disagrees with them.
• Tendency to accuse their opponents of being insane during arguments.
• Round-the-clock presence on forums. At least one of the uniform members of the team can be found online at all times, always ready to repulse any “attack” by a liberal.

Explanation of web brigades tactics in the article

• Individual work on opponents. "As soon as an opposition-minded liberal arrives on a forum, expressing a position that makes them a clear "ideological enemy”, he is immediately cornered and subjected to “active measures” by the unified web-brigade. Without provocation, the opponent is piled on with abuse or vicious “arguments” of the sort that the average person cannot adequately react to. As a result, the liberal either answers sharply, causing a scandal and getting himself labeled a “boor” by the rest of the brigade, or else he starts to make arguments against the obvious absurdities, to which his opponents pay no attention, but simply ridicule him and put forth other similar arguments."^[16]
• Accusations that opponents are working for “enemies”. The opponents are accused of taking money from Berezovskiy, the CIA, the MOSSAD, Saudi Arabia, the Zionists, or the Chechen rebels.
• Making personally offensive comments, especially of sexual nature.
• Remarkable ability to reveal personal information about their opponents and their quotes from old postings, sometimes more than a year old.
• Teamwork. "They unwaveringly support each other in discussions, ask each other leading questions, put fine points on each other’s answers, and even pretend not to know each other. If an opponent starts to be hounded, this hounding invariably becomes a team effort, involving all of the three to twenty nicknames that invariably are present on any political forum 24 hours a day."^[16]
• Appealing to the Administration. The members of teams often "write mass collective complaints about their opponents to the editors, site administrators, or the electronic “complaints book”, demanding that one or another posting or whole discussion thread they don’t like be removed, or calling for the banning of individuals they find problematic."^[16]
• Destruction of inconvenient forums. For example, on the site of the Moscow News, all critics of Putin and the FSB "were suddenly and without any explanation banned from all discussions, despite their having broken none of the site’s rules of conduct. All the postings of this group of readers, going back a year and a half, were erased by the site administrator."^[16]

Alexander Yusupovskiy responce article to Polyanskaya article

Alexander Yusupovskiy, head of the analytical department of the Federation Council of Russia (Russian Parliament) published in 2003 an article "Conspiracy theory" in Russian Journal with criticism of theory of web brigades.^[18]

Yusupovskiy's points included:

• According to Yusupovskiy, an active forum participant, it's not the first time he's faced an unfair method of polemics, when a person with "liberal democratic views" accused one's opponent of being an FSB agent as a final argument. Yusupovskiy himself didn't take Web brigades theory seriously, "naively" considering that officers of GRU or FSB have more topical problems than "comparing virtual penises" with liberals and emigrants. His own experience at forums also did not give him a reason proving the theory.
• Yusupovskiy considered Polyanskaya's article an interesting opportunity to draw a line of demarcation between analytics and its imitation. According to Yusupovskiy, authors of the article are obsessed with "a single but strong affection": to find a "Big Brother" beyond any phenomena not fitting their mindsets. Yusupovskiy called an article a classic illustration of reverted "masonic conspiracy".
• Although Yusupovskiy himself has a list of claims against Russian security services and their presence in virtual world (as "according to statements of media every security service is busy in the Internet tracking terrorism, extremism, narcotic traffic, human trafficking and child pornography"), his claims are of different nature than those of Polyanskaya.
• Criticising Polyanskaya's point that Russian forums after 9/11 show "outstanding level of malice and hatred of the USA, gloat, slander and inhumanity" as "undifferentiated assessment bordering lie and slander", Yusupovskiy noted that there is a difference between "dislike of hegemonic policy of the United States" at Russian forums and "quite friendly attitude towards usual Americans". Aggression and xenophobia don't characterize one side but are a common place of discussion (as Yusupovskiy suggested, illusion of anonymity and absence of censorship allows such stuff to be taken from subconsciousness that won't let to be spoken aloud by an internal censor otherwise). According to Yusupovskiy,

There's no lack of gloat of other kind — e.g. over Russian losses in Chechnya — or manifestations of brutal malice against "commies", "under men", Russians, Russia in posts of some our former compatriots from Israel, USA and other countries. And in a discussion of Palestineans or Arabs, "beasts", "not people", etc. are perhaps the most decent definitions given by many (not all) western participants of forums. It's specially touching to observe "briefings of hatred" (such things happen too), when Russian, Israeli and American patriots unanimously blame "Chechen-Palestinean-Islamic" terrorists...^[18]

• Commenting on the change of attitude of virtual masses in 1998-1999 authors evade any mention of the 1998 Russian financial collapse which "crowned liberal decade", preferring to blame "mysterious bad guys or Big Brother" for that change.

"About 80% of authors at all web forums very aggressively and uniformly blame the USA" as authors note, making a conclusion at the same time: "at a moment amount of totalitarian opinions at Russian forums became 60%-80%". Try to feel semantics of "extremal journalism" mindset and its logics of antithesises: either apology of Bush'es America while spitting on one's own country, either — totalitarian agentry. To illustrate "protective totalitarian" mindset, authors quote several malicious posts from masses of forum flapjaw: "Security services existed in all times, all democratic states of the West had, have and will be having them." Or: "FSB is the same security service like FBI in the USA or Mossad in Israel or Mi-6 in Great Britain". And etc. I understand that I risk of being called "totalitarian", but quite honestly I'm having difficulties to recognize signs of totalitarianism in the above quotes. As authors continue, "there are quite less real people with totalitarian views than one may consider after having a casual look on posts in any forum". Here one can only sigh: would they look on VCIOM or FOM opinion polls results, how Stalin's popularity doesn't diminish and even rises, how meaning and emotional connotations of the word "democrat" changed (from positive to negative), and would they seriously consider these tendencies of development of social consciousness...^[18]

• Authors exclude from their interpretation of events all other hypotheses, such as internet activity of a group of some "skinheads", nazbols or simply unliberal students; or hackers able to get IP addresses of their opponents.
• According to Yusupovskiy, authors treat "independence of public opinion" in spirit of irreconcilable antagonism with "positive image of Russia".^[18]

Yusupovskiy finally commented on Polyanskaya's article:

"We would never make our country's military organizations and security services work under the rule of law and legal control, if won't learn to recognize rationally and objectively their necessity and usefulness for the country, state, society and citizens. Sweeping defamation and intentional discreditation with the help of "arguments", which are obviously false, only contribute to the extrusion of security services outside of rule of law and instigates them to chaos".^[18]

2005 Inosmi.ru publishing an article from the Tygodnik Powszechny forum

In 2005 Russian website Inosmi published a Russian translation of Marian Kaluski's article "Let's talk sincerely about the Ukraine"^[19], pretending it was an article of the Polish newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, while actually the article was merely published at the forum of the newspaper. The article made rather tough points about the future of Polish-Ukrainean relationships.^[20][21]

The event caused the uproar of the Tygodnik Powszechny's staff, who called it a "disinformation operation". The same day, the network of the newspaper allegedly stopped working owing to "a mass hacking attack". The newspaper accused Russian officials:

According to Polish specialists in Russian affairs, it was a model example of “the network war”, so to say “an electronic assault” on our communication system, without which none of newspapers can work. Or perhaps it was only a warning – an actual assault would simply blast our whole network. It could have been also performed to probe the timing of a response, as experts tell us. Then, the Russian secret service made a test on us, the first such one in Poland. “The network war” has been being successfully employed in the area of former USSR countries, where the Internet plays a crucial role as the only independent source of information, free of official authority’s control (the web played such role during revolutions in Georgia as well as the Ukraine, and now – in Byelorussia). The same source claims that at least a dozen of active Russian agents work in Poland, also investigating Polish internet. Not only do they scrutinize polish websites (like those supporting Byelorussian opposition), but also perform such actions, as – for instance – contributing to internet forums on large portals (like Gazeta.pl, Onet.pl, WP.pl). Labelled as Polish Internet users, they incite anti-Semitic or anti-Ukrainian discussions or disavow articles published on the web.^[22]

In April 2005 the author of the article in question, Marian Kaluski, published an open letter, confirming authorship of his article "Let's talk sincerely about the Ukraine", as well as reaffirming his right to make the point expressed in his article. He also criticised Polish media approach "aimed to discredit" his article.^[20][21]

Grigory Svirsky short story "Anastasya"

The alleged FSB activities on the Internet have been described in the short story "Anastasya" by Russian writer Grigory Svirsky, who was interested in the moral aspects of their work.^[23] He wrote: "It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one does not see a disfigured body or the eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, the human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price for the virtual crime in his real life".^[24]

FSB site and double agents of foreign security services

FSB has a website in the Internet, FSB.Ru. Among the other information, FSB publishes its "trust phone number", which may be used by "Russian citizens collaborating with foreign security services" to become double agents. In that case, "the fee received by such agents from the foreign security services would be fully secured, and they would work with the highest grade FSB employees. The anonymity and privacy are guaranteed." ^[25][26]

According to the Law 275 of the Russian Criminal Code ("High Treason"), "A person who has committed crimes stipulated in this Article... shall be relieved from criminal responsibility if he has facilitated the prevention of further damage to the interests of the Russian Federation by informing the governmental authorities of his own free will and in due time, or in any other way, if his actions contain no other corpus delicti." ^[25][27]

See also

• Information warfare
• Harassment by computer
• Jingjing and Chacha
• Computer crime
• Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
• Astroturfing
• Web brigades
• 50 Cent Party

References