The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov

Author:Andrei Soldatov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

On the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in a glossy new business center, there is a small company named Protei. The company’s office was a bit chaotic in 2011—they had just moved in—with tables and wires all over the place. The computers had yet to be installed, but Protei was already making something highly desired outside of Russia: the equipment for making sure that the black boxes—the SORM technologies—would work in countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where authoritarian rulers with miserable human rights practices and intolerant of democracy and dissent were eager to use the technology to control the Internet. The company produced all kinds of technology from SORM-1 to SORM-3, from phone eavesdropping to Internet intercepts. In December 2011 WikiLeaks and Privacy International launched the Spy Files project, a database on companies that sell such surveillance gear around the world.19 Although most of the vendors are British, Israeli, German, and American companies, it also included Koval’s SpeechPro and Protei.

Andrei went to see another engineer who had made it in the world of secret services and secret surveillance. Vadim Sekeresh was head of the SORM department at Protei. A phlegmatic, forty-­year-old graduate of the applied mathematics department of St. Petersburg University, he seemed unruffled by the WikiLeaks disclosure. Like so many other engineers, he did not ask deep moral or ethical questions about how his products were being used. “I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Sekeresh said of the report. “I didn’t really look into it because the whole thing doesn’t bother me. After all, we are not producing the listening devices, or bugs. And . . . we aren’t the only ones producing such tech anyway.”20 A few months later he told Andrei in an e-mail, “Lots of crimes are solved thanks to technology. It’s obvious that everything could be used to harm, but it’s not related to the producers.”

In other words, it is not the engineers’ fault.

In 2012, the year Internet filtering was introduced in Russia, Protei developed a product based on DPI technology to implement the censorship of Roskomnadzor. In March 2015 Protei announced that the company had successfully deployed an Internet-­filtering system based on DPI on the network of ­Kyrgyzstan’s telecom operator MegaCom, one of the largest in the country. Russian engineers, once again, developed the hardware that brought one of the world’s most intrusive Internet-filtering technologies to Central Asia.

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