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Feb 21, 2000 - 01:00 PM

Russia's Security Agency Said to Penetrate Internet By Sergei Shargorodsky Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW (AP) - The successor to the KGB is now also spying on the Internet, raising fears that the information it collects could be used for blackmail and business espionage. "The whole Federal Security Service will be crying tomorrow over your love letters," warns one of the banners angry Russian Web designers have posted on the Internet.

Russian human-rights and free-speech advocates say the security service has already forced many of the country's 350 Internet service providers to install surveillance equipment.

"Most Internet providers in Moscow, including all the large providers and many in the provinces, have opened a hole" for security agents to peep at traffic, said Anatoly Levenchuk, a Russian Internet expert.

Like its counterparts in other countries, the Federal Security Service may argue it needs the monitoring system to catch spies, terrorists and bandits, and to combat black-market businesses and capital flight.

But the system has raised particular alarm in Russia, where memories of KGB surveillance and repression remain fresh. And the abundance of secretly filmed, juicy videotapes and transcripts of telephone conversations in Russia seems to justify the fear of blackmail by renegade security agents or others who get hold of the information.

Free-speech activists fear that the Internet surveillance is evidence of the security services' resurgence under acting President Vladimir Putin, a 15-year KGB veteran. They have already accused him of chipping away at press freedoms championed by former President Boris Yeltsin.

Last week, a government official for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of the Internet control project, called the System of Operative and Investigative Procedures or SORM-2, its Russian acronym.

Alexei Rokotyan, the Communications Ministry's electronic communications department chief, denied that the project was aimed at "total control of the information that is transmitted via the global network."

"Security organs and special forces have the right - and now the capability - to monitor private correspondence and telephone conversations of individual citizens according to the law," The Moscow Times daily quoted him as saying.

Levenchuk and others said the Federal Security Service has been quietly implementing the system at least since 1998.

"As you look at all these Orwellian things you understand it's coming - total control, total surveillance," Levenchuk told a round table held in St. Petersburg.

Federal Security Service officials apparently view the steps simply as an extension of SORM regulations enacted in the mid-1990s, which allow security agents with a warrant to tap telephones and Internet traffic.

At a series of meetings with Internet providers in 1998, security service officials described a system that would involve a box installed in providers' computers that would route electronic traffic to the local security service headquarters through a high-speed link.

The project still seems a far cry from Echelon, a high-tech spying network which, according to a European Parliament report, is coordinated by the U.S. National Security Agency and involves "routine and indiscriminate" monitoring of electronic communications around the world.

But Russia's Internet freedom activists are still raising the alarm. Levenchuk's www.libertarium.ru site is filled with accounts from mostly provincial providers that say they were forced to install SORM-2 equipment.

One provider in southern Volgograd, Bayard-Slavia Communications, actually refused when security service agents sought to "receive full and uncontrolled access to all our clients and their communications," its chief Nail Murzakhanov said.

Bayard-Slavia had its main communication line cut off and faced threats of fines from government officials. But it won a court case against the security service last fall.

Human rights advocates said Murzakhanov's confrontation with the Federal Security Service was enough to persuade many a reluctant provider.

But Anton Nosik, who edits the Vesti.Ru and Lenta.Ru electronic newspapers, said the case was rare and that he was not aware of any major providers complying with the SORM-2 directives.

Nosik was less concerned than others, saying security service agents already have access to electronic traffic and would not be able to monitor its ever-increasing volumes in full.

"Yet there is an unpleasant trend of security services trying to implement non-constitutional norms," he said. "This should not be allowed."

-- Hokie (Hokie_@hotmail.com), February 21, 2000

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