“It’s not a phone conversation, let’s at the meeting,” how often have you laughed to myself, hearing such a phrase? In vain laughed.
Soon Russian will be released — called “the Battle of Runet” — the loud blasts and received a number of prestigious awards in the West book “The Red Web” by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Some excerpts from the book already available — for example, to Medusa about the wiretaps and security measures during the Olympic games in Sochi.
Here is one impressive piece:
In 2007, the intelligence agencies have received from Russian vessels 265 937 permits the interception and recording of telephone conversations and intercept e-mail, including messages in social networks and messengers. In 2012 such permits have already been 539 864.
Journalist Oleg Salmanov, also drew attention to the fragment of the book, and supplemented it with more recent data and has built an impressive chart:
Victims of telephone wiretapping in 2015 — almost a million (!) Russians (chart: Oleg Salmanov)
In 2015, legally, on the basis of decisions of the court, the Russian intelligence services listened to nearly a million people. According to the schedule in 2016, it will be much more than a million. This is not only the “opposition leaders” and not just “political activists”; it is not the only “potential terrorists” and “suspected crimes.” Million people, it is not in a reasonable frame of operative-investigative activities, it is literally total surveillance.
Or so. The authorization to wiretap is given for six months. Estimate, at least roughly, how many different people you talked to on the phone over the past six months? 50? 100? 300? Well, even 50. Probably every one million listens too. In a telephone conversation the same two sides. So in 2015, probably tens of millions of people were party to at least one listening to a telephone conversation.
That is, that person you were. You, dear reader. Given that you read my blog, the probability is good that you got a million listens on constantly. But even if not, with a probability close to 100% of at least one of your phone conversations this year have been heard and recorded. I wonder what was that conversation? What? And, by the way, how many “experts” sitting and listening to a million people? Tens of thousands, at least.
Beware, in short.
Which, by the way, explains the degree of hysteria around the encrypted traffic on the Internet — they are already used to read and listen to literally everything, and the encrypted traffic they can’t handle: that rage.
