Russia suppresses dissent and sows a surveillance supply chain
The expanding program—formally known as the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM—was an imperfect means of oversight. The Russian telecom providers often installed and updated the technologies incompletely, which meant that the system did not always work properly. The amount of data pouring in can be overwhelming and unusable.
Initially, the technology was used against political rivals such as supporters of Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader. Demand for the tools increased after the invasion of Ukraine, according to digital rights experts. Russian authorities turned to local technology companies that built the old surveillance systems and asked for more.
The push benefited companies like Citadel, which had bought many of Russia’s largest makers of digital eavesdropping devices and controls about 60 to 80 percent of the telecommunications monitoring technology market, according to the US State Department. The United States has announced sanctions against Citadel and its current owner, Anton Cherepennikov, in February.
“Sectors related to the military and communications are getting a lot of money right now as they adapt to new demands,” said Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher who studies Russian surveillance companies at Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto.
The new technologies give the Russian security services a detailed picture of the internet. A tracking system from a Citadel subsidiary, MFI Soft, helps display information about telecom subscribers, along with statistical breakdowns of their Internet traffic, on a specialized control panel for use by regional FSB officials, according to one chart.
Another MFI Soft tool, NetBeholder, can map the locations of two phones during the day to see if they bumped into each other at the same time, indicating a possible human encounter.
Another feature, which uses location tracking to check if multiple phones are often in the same area, infers if someone might be using two or more phones. With full access to telecom network subscriber data, NetBeholder’s system can also determine which region in Russia each user is from or which country a foreigner is from.