Less than three months after granting asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, Russia is preparing to implement the kind of electronic surveillance that Snowden uncovered in the U.S.
The Communications Ministry and the KGB's successor, the Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSB, have drafted a regulation requiring Internet providers and mobile operators to install equipment allowing spy services to record and store for no less than 12 hours any data passing through their networks. According to a report in the business daily Kommersant, the ministry's draft directive also orders providers to store identifying information about participants in all data exchanges. This will include e-mail addresses, Internet addresses, web-chat IDs and the physical locations of people using Skype or Google Hangouts. The equipment is to be installed by July 1 next year.
The new directive appears to violate Article 24 of the Russian Constitution, which says personal information cannot be collected and stored without a citizen's permission. The country's existing electronic surveillance system, known as SORM, allows intelligence services to monitor Internet traffic but does not require providers to record information. The FSB and other security services need a court order to access the data they have the capacity to screen. They are not formally allowed to store anything.