Maybe a little off topic but seems like an important article. Who knows who is snooping out there. Be careful.

Russia's security agency said to penetrate Internet

Source: AP | Published: Tuesday February 22, 6:02 AM

MOSCOW, Feb 21 - 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.

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.

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.

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0002/22/A32564-2000Feb22.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 21, 2000