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Surveillance Center. A special department of Roskomnadzor controls the conversations of Russians about the war and Putin on the Internet. Investigation “System”

March 1, 2023
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In November 2022, the Belarusian hacker group “Cyberpartisans” hacked into one of the structures of Roskomnadzor – the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC). Hackers handed over to Sistema journalistsarchive of documents and letters downloaded from the center’s servers. These documents prove that a little-known enterprise plays a key role in the total state surveillance of Russians on the Internet, censors independent media, composes and sends denunciations to the Ministry of Justice about potential “foreign agents”. The specialists of the center collect “fakes” about the Russian army in social networks (including in the occupied territories), help Yandex remove information about the crimes of the Russian military in Ukraine, train neural networks to look for insults against Vladimir Putin and cartoons depicting the president as a vampire or a crab. To simplify surveillance of citizens, the GRCHTS has developed a secret messenger, which is used by employees of the entire power bloc.

“Moral Tragedy”

On the morning of December 8, 2022, employees of a branch of the Main Radio Frequency Center of Roskomnadzor (FSUE “GRCHTS”, hereinafter referred to as GRCHTS), located in a small business center in the north-east of Moscow, hastily put things in order in their offices. The manager asked them about this “just in case” in a working telegram chat – in connection with the visit of the management. Roman Nesterenko, acting general director of the GRFC, was conferring in the office with specialists from departments at that time. The main item on the agenda and the atmosphere at the meeting was described by one of the employees in the chat as “our moral tragedy.” Most likely, without irony.

The “tragedy” was that three weeks earlier, on November 18, hackers from the Belarusian group “Cyberpartisans”  announced a successful “cyberstrike” on the GRCHTs. How exactly the attack was prepared is not disclosed by the hackers. Their press secretary, Yuliana Shemetovets, told Sistema that the “Cyberpartisans” remained unnoticed in the networks of the GRFC for several months. During this time, they downloaded more than two terabytes of data – documents, programs and the contents of employee emails.

The GRCHTS officially acknowledged the hack, but said that “the situation was manageable” and the hackers were unable to gain access to “secret information and critical infrastructure.” At the same time, in an internal telegram chat, employees of the GRCHC described the situation differently: at least until early December, the center’s network was malfunctioning, the head of the information security department was fired , and ordinary employees and their relatives urged each other to close their profiles in social networks, fearing threats.

One of the participants in the GRChTs chat reminded that after the presidential elections and the suppression of protests in Belarus in 2020, “Cyber ​​partisans” created a map of “regime accomplices” , on which they placed the addresses and other personal data of the security forces. “See you there [on the map],” the employee panicked.

The issue of personal safety of the center’s employees was also discussed at the aforementioned meeting with the acting general director in December.Then Nesterenko even advised employees to change their passports and promised legal support if they received threats or, due to the leakage of personal data, “take a loan” on their behalf.

“The incident is supervised at the very top. Through their connections, including through the special services, they stop the spread of the information wave about the newsbreak,” a specialist in the media monitoring department who participated in the meeting wrote in a chat. The authorities, according to him, promised to “discuss the possible centralized deletion of personal data through punching services.”

The very next day after the meeting, it was reported in the chat that the administrators of “one of the key” telegram bots for breaking through agreed to delete data about the employees of the GRFC: “They quickly realized what the business smells like at our place of work, they are ready to cooperate.” To do this, each department was offered to “centrally” collect the full name and passport data of colleagues.

Why are the employees of the Main Radio Frequency Center, a formally unclassified enterprise, so afraid of publicity? “Cyber ​​partisans” call the GRChTs “the main Kremlin censor”. Among the two million documents downloaded from the hacked server, Sistema found evidence that the GRFC belongs to the repressive apparatus of the Russian government.

From this investigation you will learn:

  • At the end of 2019, the GRFC created a “semi-secret” messenger “Operational Interaction Cabinet” for convenient and secure communication between employees of the RKN and the GRFC with security forces: the Prosecutor General’s Office, the FSB, the FSO, the National Guard and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (mainly with employees of the Center “E” ) . In group chats, the specialists of the GRChTs publish reports on “protest moods”, and in private messages they send links to the posts of Russians with “fakes” about the Russian army to employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Since the beginning of the war, the GRCHTS has helped Roskomnadzor to identify more than 160,000 such fakes. The interface of the messenger and the content of its chats are published for the first time.
  • Employees of the GRCHTS are directly involved in state censorship on the topic of the war in Ukraine. Compile denunciations against independent Russian media and individual journalists. They collect links to information about the crimes of the Russian military and send them to Yandex “for deletion”. Even weather forecast services are subject to censorship. Employees of the GRFC also analyze the mood in the occupied Ukrainian territories through the media and social networks.
  • The monitoring service of the GRFC separately studies the “negative about Vladimir Putin” published on the Internet. The monitoring includes posts in social networks and materials in the media from each Russian federal district. The topic of the “critical state of health” of the president stands apart – publications on this topic are collected daily. Moreover, the employees of the GRFC train artificial intelligence to look for posts with “insults” against Vladimir Putin and recognize images of the president in the form of a “crab”, “moth” and “vampire”.
  • The main radio frequency center is developing several surveillance systems for Russians based on neural networks at once. These systems will recognize the faces of people in videos with “mass gatherings of people”, find “protest moods”, “discrediting traditional values” and “fakes about the president” on the Internet. To optimize surveillance, the GRFC creates its own “bot farm” to imitate the real pages of social network users – bots will be able to penetrate closed Internet communities.
  • Employees of the GRCHTS were directly involved in repressions against “foreign agents”, preparing “foreign agency” certificates for the Ministry of Justice long before the department began massively assigning this status to people, organizations and the media in the second half of 2021. References with biographies of potential “foreign agents” and links to their publications were also compiled in relation to some structures and people loyal to the Kremlin.

“Universal Soldiers”. How the Main Radio Frequency Center works

Messenger for denunciations

In the first three quarters of 2019, a record number of protests took place in Russia. Tens of thousands of residents of the Arkhangelsk region took part in rallies against the construction of a landfill in Shiyes. Yekaterinburgers fought to defend the square near the drama theater, where the construction of the temple was planned. And from July to September, when independent candidates were not allowed to vote in the Moscow City Duma elections, the largest protests since 2011 took place in the capital.

Against the backdrop of these events, in mid-July, the directorate of the RKN held a series of meetings with representatives of law enforcement agencies: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the National Guard. Based on the results of the meetings, it was decided to start interaction between government agencies with the RKN and employees of the GRFC, in order to“speed up response time and take action on various violations, rallies”. The RKN set a subordinate enterprise the task of developing a secure messenger for communication between employees of law enforcement agencies, the RKN and the GRFC itself. The project was named “Cabinet of Operational Interaction” (AS KOV).

What is already known about the “semi-secret” AS KOV

The development of the first version of the Office of Operational Interaction messenger began in September 2019 and ended in December. At the beginning of the next year, employees of the GRFC demonstrated the operation of the system to the deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Vadim Subbotin. During the presentation, the developers emphasized that the system solves the problem of “organizing interaction” between government departments on topics such as “fake news” and “near football”.

Having studied the leak from the GRCHTS, Sistema found out how the “operational” messenger looks and functions. Its design is not much different from its public analogues: on the left is a list of chats, in the middle is a field with messages, and on the right is a list by last name (with an indication of the place of work) of the participants in the chat being viewed. All chats are group chats, each with a specific theme. Important messages can be converted into “tasks” – they are taken on by one of the responsible employees. “Tasks” are assigned a specific status: “new”, “in progress”, “completed”, or “canceled”. AS KOV allows you to upload almost any kind of files to messages: documents, pictures, video, audio.

The GRFC did not answer Sistema’s question about the costs of creating the Operational Interaction Cabinet. There is only information in open data that in December 2020, Roskomnadzor planned to spend 7 million rubles to create a mobile application for the KOV messenger.

On the crest of war

The second, final version of AS KOV was finalized by the end of 2021: in addition to the browser version, the application for mobile devices mentioned above and the ability to write private messages appeared. The final release of the messenger took place in a timely manner – after the full-scale invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine, AS KOV began to be actively used for war-related repressions.

Here is a list of current thematic chats in the Operational Interaction Room for November 2022:

  • Protest moods
  • Destabilization promptly
  • Terrorism
  • Protest events promptly
  • Interethnic relations
  • foreign intervention
  • Extremism

In the “Protest moods” group, the employees of the GRFC daily publish detailed reports “on the presence of protest moods in social networks.” Reports are generated based on the monitoring of 546 “federal” and 3 thousand “regional” accounts in social networks (VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, YouTube video hosting and Telegram channels).

Each such report begins with a review of the main stories of the day, which were discussed by Runet users. For example, a report dated October 13, 2022 states that “Ukrainian authors” on that day disseminated information about shelling by the Russian army of civilians and civilian objects in Ukraine. “Pro-government speakers”, in turn, accused the Ukrainian side of “speculating on the subject of civilians affected by shelling.” Further, the high-profile newsbreaks discussed in “opposition sources” are detailed and divided into two categories: federal and regional. It is separately monitored whether there was a “discussion of the opposition agenda” in “pro-government” groups and accounts.

Another obligatory item on which the analysis is carried out is “revealed materials indicating the channels for transferring funds to opposition structures, terrorist and extremist organizations.” Posts from social networks and even user messages in regional chats get there if they are talking about material support for small or large independent media, political prisoners .

The daily report ends with information about the planned protests, indicating the venue and organizer of the rally. Each report also cites the number of materials “with signs of organizing public events held in violation of the established procedure,” which, following the results of the monitoring day, the employees of the SRCRC sent for consideration to the Prosecutor General’s Office . Similarly, the authors of the reports indicate the number of requests to block such materials received during the day by the GRFC from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

In the “Destabilization Operatively” chat, the employees of the GRFC publish daily reports with the title “Materials of value”. These reports indicate exactly which social media accounts of “anti-Russian public opinion leaders” were sent by the GRChTs employees to the Prosecutor General’s Office for “preparing a demand in connection with the discrediting of the RF Armed Forces or the dissemination of deliberately false information about the SVO in Ukraine.” Judging by the leak documents, only from November 11 to November 14, 2022, links to the accounts of TV presenter Yevgeny Kiselyov, opera singer and ex-State Duma deputy Maria Maksakova, and writer Anna Berseneva were sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Links to “discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” materials are sent by the employees of the GRFC to prosecutors in a personal message in the same AS KOV messenger. Sistema was able to identify two employees of the GP who received such links. These are senior prosecutor Timur Abregov, who represented the prosecution in the court recognizing Meta (the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) as an extremist organization, and senior prosecutor Dmitry Vagurin, who took part in the trial to ban International Memorial , and in the trial against the Krasnoyarsk portal KrasNews explained why in Russia it is forbidden to use the word “war”.

Having studied the files with links for prosecutors, Sistema found out that they include not only “anti-Russian leaders of public opinion”, but also ordinary users of such social networks as “Odnoklassniki” or “VKontakte”. The pages of many of them are already blocked.

1 / 3 Interface of the messenger “Cabinet of operational interaction” (you can click to enlarge)

What else is published in the chats of the “Operational Interaction Room” messenger

As of mid-November, there were 60 participants in the Protest Moods group, including 26 employees of the GRCHTS, 15 employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, nine employees of the Prosecutor General’s Office, eight employees of the National Guard and one employee each from the RKN and the FSO. Based on a leak from the GRCHTS, it is impossible to understand whether employees of the presidential administration, regional governments and the FSB are sitting in “operational” chats. Moreover, judging by the documents, the employees of these departments are connected to the AS KOV.

As of July 7, 2022, the total number of users of the Office of Operational Interaction messenger was almost a thousand people. Moreover, some of the users of AS KOV are hidden even for the specialists of the GRFC themselves. For example, in the general table of messenger users there is only one employee of the FSO, although the leak contains a document about the connection of 32 more employees of this special service. The only FSB officer in the table is listed as “Employee Employee” – probably, state security workers use one account, thereby not “highlighting” their names.

The AS KOV messenger is also used by “media” officials known to the general public: Deputy Mayor of Moscow Natalya Sergunina, head of the Moscow DIT Eduard Lysenko and assistant to Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen Press Minister Akhmed Dudayev.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QTEFp/14/

Only by indirect signs can one guess how employees of law enforcement agencies use information from chats. For example, almost half of the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs connected to AS KOV work in the Main Directorate for Combating Extremism (Center “E”). It is known that in St. Petersburg alone, employees of the “E” Center have repeatedly detained citizens for posts about the Russian army in social networks.

Over the two years of using AS KOV, the employees of the GRFC sent more than44 thousand messagesand materials on the topics of “extremism, terrorism and protest activity” to various departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor General’s Office – an average of 90 materials per working day. And after the start of the war, the RKN handed over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs materials regarding 182 “leaders of public opinion at the federal and regional levels.” In the reports of the RKN and the GRFC from the leak, we were unable to find accurate information whether criminal cases were initiated based on the “communication” of the GRFC employees with the security forces in the “Operative Interaction Cabinet”.

Military censorship

Media

At the end of March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave his first interview since the start of the war to Russian journalists: Meduza editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov, Dozhd TV channel editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko, writer Mikhail Zygar, and Kommersant special correspondent Vladimir Solovyov. A few minutes before the interview was released, Roskomnadzor warned the Russian media “of the need to refuse” the publication. And in relation to the publications that spoke with the Ukrainian president, a “check to determine the degree of responsibility” began, the agency said in a statement. The Prosecutor General’s Office also promised to give this interview a “legal assessment”. As a result, Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta

Even six months later, the Russian authorities have not forgotten about the resonant interview. In mid-November, the RKN “waited a decision” from the leadership of the presidential administration on the issue of “sending letters to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Russian Investigative Committee about bringing to administrative responsibility” journalists who interviewed Zelensky.

An illustrative story from the point of view of the scrupulousness of the RKN happened with the Silver Rain radio station. On the evening of March 2, a message with a graphic inscription “We can’t speak, we don’t want to lie” appeared on the Silver Rain telegram channel , and the next day the radio station took off the air all spoken programs.

“Since March 3, at the request of Roskomnadzor, all information programs have been excluded from the air of the Silver Rain radio channel in connection with criticism of the NMD of the RF Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine. Currently, information programs have been resumed on the air. They do not contain criticism of the special military operation,” – according to the Roskomnadzor report.

Nevertheless, the GRFC continues to monitor the broadcasts of the radio station on a daily basis. After the talk programs returned to the air of “Silver Rain”, the center’s employees began to prepare reports with an “information slice” of the radio channel.

“… The situation with the missing one and a half million sets of field uniforms in the Ministry of Defense was discussed. The presenters cited official statements by officials, adding that those responsible for the loss should be punished by law, and not transferred to other positions <…> materials with negative information on the SVO or unreliable information not detected”, – a squeeze from the “slice” of the program “Morning under the Silver Rain” for October 4, prepared by the GRFC.

In the files from the leak, Sistema also found a certificate “on the situation” with the Samizdat application , in which the materials of several Russian-speaking investigative journalists are available to readers from Russia without a VPN. The document, which was drawn up on the day the application was released, proposes to send a request to the Prosecutor General’s Office to form a requirement for its “permanent blocking”.

Since the beginning of the war, the RKN has blocked the websites of at least 95 media that worked for the Russian audience. For the dissemination of “inaccurate information in the context of the SVO”, with the assistance of the RKN, 16 protocols on administrative offenses against Russian-language media were drawn up, and eight issues of newspapers were handed over to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for “consideration of the issue” of initiating administrative cases. In the internal documents of the GRFC and the RKN, such media are called “opposition resources”.

search engines

– Hi, what is the “special task Yandex U”? – writes an employee of the GRFC Konstantin to his colleague Elena in one of the messengers.

– Hello! For search queries which, links are then [sent] to Yandex to be excluded from search results, – Elena answers .

In the next message, Konstantin clarifies whether he is referring to search queries like: “Russia is bombing residential buildings”, “Russia is shooting civilians”, “Russian military atrocities in Bucha”, “Russian military crimes”, “Russian conscripts in Ukraine”, ” huge losses of Russian troops in Ukraine. Elena answers in the affirmative.

In a leak from the GRFC, Sistema discovered several Excel tables at once with the name “Yandex U special task” . Each of the tables contains from 30 to 200 links to anti-war materials in social networks that are found in Yandex for certain search queries. In addition to the above, the tables also have the following:“Putin’s mobilization”, “guys from Russia surrender”, “what Russian guys are dying for in Ukraine”. Employees of the on-duty service for monitoring the means of mass communications of the GRCHC collect links that fall into the search results for these keywords and send them to Yandex for subsequent removal. We selectively checked a number of requests: the links indicated in the tables do not really appear on any page in the Yandex search results.

The Yandex press service told Sistema that the “specific link” could disappear from the search if it gets into the register of blocked sites of the ILV or by a court decision. And “Yandex” itself, according to a company representative, did not receive “any lists of links” and does not remove “any links from the issue on its own.”

Earlier, journalists drew attention to the fact that the search results of Yandex and Google on key events of the war are noticeably different. In particular, when querying “Dnepr” or “Dnepr rocket” in the issuance of “Yandex” there is practically no news about the January tragedy in the Dnieper, when a rocket hit a residential building. At the same time, Google immediately gives the top news on the topic. At the end of January, Meduza studied the leaked source codes of Yandex services and noticed that the search engine tried to block the issuance of images of Putin if users were looking for, for example, “bunker grandfather”, and Nazi symbols when they were looking for the letter Z.

Starting from February 24, at the request of Roskomnadzor, more than 11.8 thousand materials containing “reports of massive losses of the RF Armed Forces in manpower and equipment, mass surrender, as well as attacks on civilian infrastructure and the killing of civilians.”

Social network

Employees of the GRFC daily analyze posts in all popular social networks that are not blocked in Russia: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, YouTube, Telegram and LiveJournal. For each social network, a separate Excel table is created, where links to posts (or comments to them) and their content are loaded.

In one shift, an employee of the center finds from 100 to 300 “fake” messages, and not only in large political channels and groups.For example, the monitoring of the Telegram messenger also includes public chats, the audience of which does not exceed 20 people.. One of the tables with “fakes” collected over several days even included messages from a small chat for selling perfume and a group for finding work in Moscow.

In these tables, “fakes” are classified by topic, which varied slightly depending on the course of the war. Here is their list:

  • Killing civilians
  • Shelling of civilians
  • Shelling of cities
  • Losses of personnel and equipment
  • Prisoners of war
  • Marauding
  • Mobilization
  • Destabilization within the Russian Federation

Later, among the thousands of references with identified “negative information about the SVO and the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” several dozen are selected to be sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office via the “Operative Interaction Office” messenger.

From the beginning of the war to November 2022, Roskomnadzor, with the help of the GRC, revealed more than 40 thousand messages with “calls for protests against the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine” and 160-170 thousand materials with “inaccurate information regarding the ongoing special military operation.”https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/VFE7g/7/

Ukraine and the occupied territories

On September 30, 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered a pathetic speech in the Georgievsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, in which he announced the annexation of the Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine. Later, the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian annexation attempt: 143 out of 193 UN member states voted in favor of the resolution. Only five countries were against , including Russia.

Two weeks laterGRCHTS specialists noticed that on several Russian sites that publish weather forecasts, the occupied territories are still marked as Ukrainian. The center staff compiled a list of such services and probably contacted their owners. By November 6, 10 out of 15 sites marked the captured areas as Russian. By the time the material was published, the remaining five weather forecast services had not changed their position: the regions were still marked as Ukrainian.

Of course, the GRFC started monitoring social networks and media in Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions even before the “official” annexation. Sources were gradually collected from August, and by mid-November, the GRFC monitored 40 Kherson and 55 Zaporozhye pages in various social networks. Each of them is separately marked as “pro-Russian”, “neutral” or “opposition”. A number of “opposition” communities have already been blocked for users with Russian IP addresses. For example, the RKN blocked seven Kherson groups, and, in addition to the pro-Ukrainian Kherson publics , an “ultra-patriotic” group was also blocked , judging by the name and content associated with the pro-Kremlin NOD movement .

Monitoring of the annexed territories of the “DPR” and “LPR” is on a larger scale: by mid-November, the GRFC analyzed 402 accounts in the social networks of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

He studied the center and content of television and radio broadcasts in the territories controlled by the Russian army.

“TV channels covered the theme of Holodomor Remembrance Day as a “holiday” in Ukraine; the belief of the relative majority of Ukrainian citizens in a fictitious version of the Holodomor as a genocide of Ukrainians,” one of the analytical documents of the GRCHC says. “The materials were accompanied by pro-Russian comments from the host and ironic judgments about the celebration Ukraine at the state level of the ill-conceived consequences of collectivization on the basis of the fictitious idea of ​​a Ukrainian “non-Russian” identity, about the frightening erection into a cult of hunger.

In total, in the territories of the “DNR”, “LNR”, as well as in the occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, access to 262 sites of Ukrainian television and radio channels, as well as sites that allow viewing them online, is restricted. And on the territory of Russia, judging by the internal statistics of the RKN, access to 630 Ukrainian sites is limited.

“Negative” about Putin

At the very end of 2022, at a briefing with journalists, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Vladimir Putin’s health is “a matter of state security.” After analyzing the leaked documents from the GRCHTS, Sistema learned that the center’s specialists are indeed very closely following publications about the president’s allegedly “critical state of health” in the media and social networks. But the matter is not limited to the health of Vladimir Putin: any negative about the head of state is being studied. Moreover, the GRFC plans to train artificial intelligence to search the Internet for offensive words addressed to the Russian president.

“The critical state of health of the President of the Russian Federation”

Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday in the status of president of a warring country. In 2022, questions about Putin’s health were especially frequent: Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on the health of the head of state at least five times. Peskov made the first such comment after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on April 1 to his friend , the former editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station Alexei Venediktov.

“When asked if Vladimir Putin is sick with thyroid cancer and whether he had any operations related to oncology, Peskov said that these statements are “fiction and falsehood.” To the question: “Do I understand correctly that Vladimir Putin is not sick Cancer?”, Peskov replied: “That’s right,” he then retold his dialogue with the President’s press secretary Venediktov.

A few hours before this conversation, the Proekt newspaper published an investigation that Putin was accompanied on his trips by an average of nine doctors, and one of his almost constant companions was a surgeon who specialized in thyroid cancer. The material also said that since the mid-2000s, the president has been traveling to Altai to take bloody baths with an extract from young maral horns (antler baths).

The specialists of the GRFC daily analyze messages on the topic “Vladimir Putin’s critical health condition” using the Brand Analytics system . It allows you to automatically collect messages from social networks.

According to the RKN itself,the share of messages on the topic of Putin’s health ranks second (after “fakes on the topic of SVO”) in the total number of materials deleted or blocked in Russia. The topics of “mobilization”, “crisis of the Russian economy”, “nuclear war” and “conspiracy theories” gave way to silver to the health of the head of state.

From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok

“In the regional mass media <…> Putin was accused of creating such a system of government in the country, in which officials and their families are enriched, as well as the “extinction” and “impoverishment” of the Russian people. opposition, the destruction of the rights and freedoms of citizens, “mass repressions” – an excerpt from the report “Negative about the President of the Russian Federation” for the first week of September 2022, prepared by the specialists of the GRFC.

And in a number of “individual regions” of Russia, “negative publications” against Putin related to the anniversary of the September 2004 terrorist attack at Beslan School No. 1 were also being circulated. The authors of the comments, write the center’s staff in the report, called the Russian president the “executioner of Beslan”, who “sacrificed his citizens,” from whose lips never “words of ordinary human sympathy” were heard either for the victims of the terrorist attack in Beslan, or for the relatives of the dead crew members of the submarine. boats “Kursk”.

The last thesis was taken by the authors of the report from a 16-minute video in the small telegram channel Pravda Goroda Seversk (377 subscribers at the time of publication). It belongs to 63-year-old pensioner Marina Novikova, one of the first defendants in criminal cases about “fake” about the army. She has been under house arrest for more than six months and faces three years in prison. According to the leak documents,her channel is included in the regular monitoring of “negativity about the president of the Russian Federation”.

The specialists of the GRFC prepare reports on the “negative” about the Russian president on the basis of a variety of sources: federal, regional and foreign. Moreover, the center separately analyzes each of the eight federal districts of the Russian Federation. For example, in the North-Western Federal District, the center of which is St. Petersburg, 45 media and more than 100 sources in social networks are analyzed – both large publics, for example, Arkhangelsk Life on VKontakte (231 thousand subscribers), and very small ones. – “Komi against United Russia” (393 participants).

Since September 2022, the regime for compiling reports on “negative” has changed: if earlier they were prepared daily, now they are written once a week. This is due to the “sharp reduction in the pool of sources” in which critical publications about Vladimir Putin may appear, because most of the “opposition media, including regional ones” were blocked or stopped working, and most of the “opposition speakers” lost their pages on VKontakte “. About this in one of the reports that Sistema found in a leak, the specialists of the GRFC themselves write about this.

It is difficult for HRCC staff to analyze blocked resources – they use free VPN services that “do not provide a stable and high-speed connection,” the same report says. Recall that it is Roskomnadzor that is engaged in blocking websites and VPN services .

“Crab”, “moth”, “vampire”

On April 22, 2019, in the Novgorod region, a court fined local resident Yuri Kartyzhev 30,000 rubles for two posts on VKontakte with the comment “Putin is a fabulous d*****b” . In his social networks, Kartyzhev later published an audio recording of the meeting, at which the judge read out his decision.

“March 31, 2019 at 18:45 Kartyzhev <…> posted two notes with a fragment of text on the Internet on the social network Vkontakte. Notes with the text “Putin is fabulous …,” the judge suddenly stammered , but still finished his thought: – …A swear word”.

The Kartyzhev case is the first known instance of the application of the law on contempt of authority, adopted in 2019. However, a criminal article for “insulting a government representative” appeared in the Russian Criminal Code as early as 1997. Initiating criminal cases for insulting Putin began in the mid-2000s, during his second presidential term. In May 2006, the Ivanovo prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case against Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor-in-chief of the Kursiv publication, for his article “Putin as a phallic symbol of Russia.” Then the journalist received a fine of 20 thousand rubles.

The specialists of the GRFC even have a special manual with recommendations for finding offensive words. In particular, it states that it is a mistake to classify materials that contain “signs of indecent form” as an insult to the president, but there is no focus on the individual: “P****ts, n***ya Putin signed this law! ” is not considered an insult to the president.

In order to optimize the search for materials that offend Vladimir Putin, the structure of Roskomnadzor decided to involve artificial intelligence.

In mid-August 2022, the GRCHTs allocated 57.7 million rubles to the Moscow IT company Eksikyushn RDC for the development of the Oculus system, which, based on neural networks, will analyze photos, videos and texts on websites, social networks and instant messengers for prohibited information , wrote Kommersant. Having studied the leak from the center, Sistema found out that the representatives of the GRFC did not tell many details about this service.

Among the leaked documents, we found a “graphic entity classifier” for training the Oculus neural network to find insults to Vladimir Putin. The classifier is a description of pictures,on which Oculus will learn to automatically detect insults to the president. They are divided into two types: “offensive images of the president” and “comparison of the president with negative characters” – “Putin in the form of a crab “, “Putin in the form of a moth “, as well as comparisons of the president with Adolf Hitler or a vampire. Here is a complete list of these “entities”:https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/yBT0N/12/

Artificial intelligence in the service of Big Brother

“Oculus”

In addition to searching for materials with “insulting the President of the Russian Federation”, the Oculus system will analyze content on the Internet on the topics of “extremism”, “calls for riots”, “LGBT propaganda”, “suicide”, “drugs” and “tobacco display”. The neural network will be trained to search for “calls for riots” using such “graphic entities” as photographs of Alexei Navalny and his associates (Leonid Volkov, Ivan Zhdanov and Lyubov Sobol), images of the “burning Kremlin”, “storming of the Winter Palace” and blue and white -white flag , photos of rallies of different years in Russia and Ukraine (Bolotnaya and Manezhnaya squares, Maidan). The list also includes the symbols of the Men’s State movement recognized as extremist in Russia,takes a pro-Russian stance in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and even images of the communist red flag and the hammer and sickle.

The Oculus presentation, prepared in early March by Roman Korostashov, head of the analysis and forecasting department of the GRFC, explicitly states that the neural network will not only “recognize mass gatherings of people” in the context of calls for rallies or to overthrow the government, but also recognize the faces of individuals:“Given the presence of a beard or mask, determine the age”. And as an illustration of the fact that the system can recognize text in photos and videos, the presentation contains a screenshot of a Tiktok video calling for people to join a rally in support of Alexei Navalny on January 23, 2021.

Judging by the document describing the technical requirements for the Oculus, the system will analyze 200,000 images per day. For stable operation, the service will need at least 48 servers equipped with graphics accelerators. The development of a system worth almost 60 million rubles was supposed to end on December 12, 2022. The development company completed work on the creation of Oculus on December 28, 2022, follows from the contract card on the public procurement website. IT experts doubted that such a system could be developed within the specified time frame. The GRFC and Eksikyushn RDC did not answer Sistema’s questions about the readiness of the Oculus and the timing of its commissioning.

“Vepr”

In addition to searching for a development company for Oculus, in the middle of summer, the GRFC was also looking for a contractor to develop the Vepr system. With the help of artificial intelligence, it should automatically search for “fakes” in the media and other network resources, Izvestia wrote . Judging by the public procurement website, the starting price of the competition was 60 million rubles, and in August the tender was won by the St. Petersburg IT company Neobit, which promised to develop Vepr for half the amount – 30 million rubles. In 2021, this firm was included in the sanctions list of the US Department of the Treasury as one of six Russian organizations that cooperated with the Russian special services, helping them to carry out cyber attacks against the United States.

In the public field, “Vepr” is positioned as a necessary tool for the early detection of “points of information tension” (TIN) on the Internet. By these “points” the GRFC means “the facts of the dissemination of socially significant information under the guise of reliable messages, which creates a threat of mass violation of public order and security, creates a threat of harm to the life or health of citizens.” Having studied the documents of the leak, Sistema found out what is actually meant by the identification of the notorious TIN.

The presentation file of the system, prepared by the head of the analysis and forecasting department of the GRFC, Roman Korostashov, says that the threat to the Russians is the “widespread” of materials that have a“negative information and psychological impact”:

  • Destabilization of the socio-political situation
  • Manipulation of public opinion
  • Disinformation
  • Discrediting traditional values

The same document indicates the main tasks that the Vepr neural network will solve by monitoring the media field:

  • Identification of protest moods and facts of destabilization of Russian society (including on the topics of territorial integrity, ethnic hatred, migration policy).
  • Identification of the negative in relation to the first persons of the state, fakes about the first persons of the state, about the state and the country as a whole.
  • Identification of manipulations of public opinion, polarization of public opinion (including on the topics of vaccination, non-systemic opposition, sanctions pressure).
  • Substitution and discrediting of traditional ideological, spiritual, moral, cultural and family values ​​(including propaganda of sexual “freedoms”, legalization of drugs, pro-Western values).

To identify TIN, the system will apply a “risk-based” approach, the document states. This refers to the definition of priority “points” for monitoring: priority topics (“protests”), sources (“opposition telegram channels”) and authors (“foreign agents”). The expected effects from using the Vepr service are called “detection of manipulations in the information sphere” and “prevention of rally activity.”

Judging by the information from the public procurement website, Neobit should complete the development of Vepr in July 2023. In the future, the GRFC plans to spend more than 379 million rubles to improve the system. Such a huge amount is explained by the fact that by 2025, according to the idea of ​​​​the structure of Roskomnadzor, Vepr should be able to:

  • “Track, record and prevent the formation and growth of real protest activity.”
  • “Automate the processes of processing and decision-making on incoming information that carries a potential threat.” For example, give a rebuttal, block materials, or use “other countermeasures.”

Judging by the technical documentation of the systems, “Oculus”, created to search for “forbidden information”, and “Vepr”, which is being developed to identify “points of information tension” (fakes), largely duplicate each other’s functions. Probably, they should become part of another system – “Clean Internet”. These are different projects, but their essence boils down to one thing: to simplify the search for information about the protests and “oppositionists” for the employees of the GRCHTS, and also automatically identify “negative” materials about Vladimir Putin or posts with “discrediting traditional values.” Based on the leaked documents, Sistema failed to understand why create three different neural networks that do the same thing.

“Clean Internet”

At the end of 2019 and throughout 2020, the management of the GRFC held a number of meetings with representatives of the Yandex company. At these meetings, representatives of the IT giant assured the leaders of the center that they have an API for “search by text” in the public domain, but with “certain restrictions” that they are ready to “remove for the needs of Roskomnadzor.”

GRCHTS could get access to the extended limits of the Yandex API to analyze the part of the world Internet indexed by the search engine in the second half of 2020. At the same time, the center began to develop the architecture of the system based on neural networks “Clean Internet”. The only public mention of the system is in one of the reporting documents for 2020 on the RKN website. It says that its main task is to automatically search for “forbidden information” (PI) on the Internet. After examining the documents from the leak, Sistema found out what exactly the GRCHTs puts into the concept of “prohibited information” and that the center is ready to use even not quite legal methods to effectively search for such content.

The development of the Clean Internet architecture started back in July 2020, the stated goal of the project is to reduce human “labor costs” when monitoring materials that violate Russian law. Recall that such links are entered in the Unified Register of Prohibited Information . And if earlier the RKN specialists mainly manually searched for GIS on the Internet, then the search robot (crawler) of the Clean Internet will independently scan the “public Russian-speaking segment” of the Internet and find links with GIS, indicate the type of GIS and generate screenshots of pages. A person will only need to check the accuracy of the final result of the system.

According to the initial plan of the project, the Clean Internet would search for suicidal content, child pornography, materials related to ISIS and the Right Sector , as well as “calls for illegal mass events” and ” involvement of minors in illegal actions.” Moreover, the search robot must scan not only text, but also media content – pictures, videos.

Simplistically, the scheme of work of the “Clean Internet” can be divided into two parts. One crawler scans sites in search engines (for this, the Yandex API was needed), and the other crawls content on social networks. GRCHTS also plans to create a robot for the Mail.ru search engine. The crawler for social networks, in turn, already knows how to work with the social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru Answers, My World, LiveJournal and YouTube. As planned by the developers of the system, Clean Internet will learn to scan the rest of the social networks in 2023.

A month after the start of the war, in March 2022, the GRFC realized that the crawlers were showingpoor result when scanning materials on the topics “mass events” and “involvement of minors”, therefore, developed a new ambitious plan for the development of the “Clean Internet”, which received the conditional name “20 steps”. According to him, in addition to two problematic topics, by May 2023 the robots of the system will learn to detect violations on topics:

  • “Insulting the President of the Russian Federation”
  • “Charging the president of extremism”
  • “Fakes about the President”
  • “Fakes about the state and the country as a whole”
  • “Promotion of non-traditional sexual relations and sexual deviations”

The GRFC did not answer Sistema’s question about the cost of developing the Clean Internet. The press service of Yandex, in a conversation with Sistema, did not confirm, but did not deny the meetings of its employees with the management of the GRFC on the topic of expanding search limits. According to a company spokesman, “such changes” are not “exclusive or special conditions.”

Bot farm

Judging by the technical documentation of the “Clean Internet”, its crawlers are not able to scan closed groups in social networks. These communities can only be entered by submitting an application for membership – and often passing the administrator verification . Probably, in order to solve this problem, in the summer of 2022, the GRFC began developing another additional functionality for the Clean Internet – a “bot farm”. The leak documents do not contain information about the planned number of robots. It is only known that each bot will imitate real human accounts in various social networks.

As planned by the developers, the personal profile of each bot is filled with content “in order to create the appearance of a live account”: photos, posts, history, personal data. Moreover, the profile information must be filledtaking into account the “psychotypes” that are characteristic of the “detectable type of prohibited content”. A mechanism will also be developed to bypass the graphic and audio protection of social networks and scripts for “automated verification of administrators and moderators of social networks” (responses to correspondence).

One of the problems that can arise when creating a “bot farm” is that in order to register a large number of accounts, you need to have an equally large stock of mobile numbers. Therefore, the GRFC planned to request the support of the RKN in terms of “interaction with mobile operators” in order to gain access to “eSIM APIs” that are used to manage virtual SIM cards.

According to the project passport, the “bot farm” should be ready in May 2023. The GRFC did not respond to questions about this project.

Is this even legal?

Logistics in the war with “foreign agents”

On January 6, 2023, Russian actor Artur Smolyaninov gave a resonant interview to Novaya Gazeta Europe. “If I went to this war, then only on the side of Ukraine,” he said. These words caused a flurry of criticism among the artist’s colleagues in show business and Russian officials who supported the war, and the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, instructed to open a criminal case against Smolyaninov.

A week after the interview was released, the Russian Ministry of Justice declared the actor a “foreign agent.” Such a quick recognition of Smolyaninov as an “enemy of the people” may mean that one can become a “foreign agent” bypassing the GRFC, which takes a long time to prepare its reports. Sistema has found out that it is possible to be a potential “foreign agent” for months, or even years, and not only “oppositionists”, but also people and publications loyal to the Kremlin become “candidates”.

In the shadow of the Ministry of Justice

On July 15, 2021, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office recognized the investigative media “Proekt” as an “undesirable” organization. On the same day, his editor-in-chief Roman Badanin and four other journalists of the Project, as well as two editors of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Media (Maxim Glikin and Yulia Yarosh) and Radio Liberty journalist Elizaveta Maetnaya , were declared “foreign agents” as “foreign agents”. A week later, the Ministry of Justice recognized another employee of Open Media, Ilya Rozhdestvensky, as a “foreign agent”, and in early August, Roskomnadzor blocked the site of the publication itself.

Having studied the leak from the GRFC, Sistema found out that the employees of the enterprise had prepared “foreign agency certificates” on the publications “Proekt” and “Open Media”, as well as on the aforementioned journalistsback in december 2020(in the case of Maetna, in November). That is, more than six months before the repressions against them. At the same time, the GRChTs compiled similar reports about The Bell media, which the Ministry of Justice recognized as a “foreign agent” exactly two years later, as well as about Novaya Gazeta , the Kholod magazine and its editor-in-chief Taisiya Bekbulatova, who was recognized as a “foreign agent” in December 2021 .

On the other hand, on December 16, 2020, the GRCHC compiled a “foreign agent” report on human rights activist Lev Ponomarev – and two weeks later he became one of the first individuals to be included in the list of “foreign agents”.

What employees of the GRCHTS write in “foreign agency” certificates

Starting from 2021, the GRFC has increased its work on reporting on potential foreign agents.

In February, the employees of the enterprise, among others, prepared information about the YouTube channel “Edition” and its founder Alexei Pivovarov , in April – reports about the former editor-in-chief of the radio station “Echo of Moscow” Alexei Venediktov and legal entities associated with the Echo liquidated at the beginning of the war . The reference to the Meduza publication, which was included in the register of media outlets as “foreign agents” on April 23, 2021, was compiled by the specialists of the GRFC literally two days before the media was included in the list. And in the summer, against the background of the elections to the State Duma, the GRCHTS increased the pace so much that reports were already compiled according to the lists of employees of entire editorial offices and public organizations. In June-August alone, the center’s specialists prepared 346 such certificates.

The GRFC began compiling “foreign agency” reports in mid-October 2020. A year later, their number reached 704. By that time, 71 persons involved in these certificates – individuals and legal entities – had already been entered in the register of “foreign agents”.

Sistema found a detailed table with the GRFC reports for October 18, 2021 (just then the number of certificates reached 704). The people and organizations that appear on this list are divided into different subgroups depending on what threats they pose.

  • Author of foreign media agent; foreign edition
  • Employee/author of an opposition publication; Opposition publication
  • Founder/Owner of an opposition publication
  • Journalist, blogger and celebrity
  • An employee of an election monitoring organization; Election Monitoring
  • Human rights activities
  • Social activities
  • Working with bloggers
  • LGBT theme
  • Other

Judging by the reporting document that the GRCHC prepared on the basis of this table, the center’s employees were unable to “establish the logic” of the decisions of the Ministry of Justice on entering “foreign agents” into the register: “Because of the total number of requests for the preparation of certificates regarding members of the Golos movement or publications “Proekt.Media” and “Important stories” – as a result, not all are included in the register.

“One can only assume that the determining factor [for being recognized as a foreign agent] is opposition activity, a conflict between a publication and an official, etc.”– this is how the reporting document of the GRFC on “foreign agents” ends.

As an example of a “conflict” in the report and the table itself, the announcement by a “foreign agent” in May 2021 of the business publication VTimes, created by former employees of Vedomosti, is given. In the table opposite VTimes, in the column for comments, it says “conflict”, and in the explanatory document it is separately indicated that VTimes is the media, “whose journalist was sued by Rosneft PJSC”.

In 2022, employees of the GRCHTS began compiling “foreign agency” certificates via telegram channels: Sistema discovered in a leak documents about the Sirena channel, which was created by Alexei Navalny’s associates in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and about the We Can Explain channel (created by on the basis of the channel “Open media” Mikhail Khodorkovsky).https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/czj3F/5/https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Fhzwr/10/

“The bell rings for you too”

Until the end of October 2021, that is, in the same month when the above-mentioned table and the “foreign agency” report were compiled, the employees of the GRCHC wrote 50 more certificates. In addition to the publication Znak.com , writer Viktor Shenderovich, artist and former political prisoner Yulia Tsvetkova, new documents include youth show business stars: rapper Alisher Morgenstern, declared a “foreign agent” in May 2022, video bloggers Nikolai Sobolev, Maryana Rozhkova (Maryana Ro) and Eldar Dzharakhov. The Ministry of Justice declared Sobolev a “foreign agent” on February 3, 2023.

Analyzing the leak from the GRFC, Sistema found out that the “foreign agency” certificate was also compiled on the comic YouTube channel of comedian Alexander Gudkov “Chicken Curry” (the most popular shows on the channel are “League of Bad Jokes” and “Comment Out”). And the mysterious author of “20 Ideas for the Development of Russia” Dmitry Davydov, about whom many thought that he did not exist , became a defendant in such a certificate back in August 2021 – two months before the release of the first investigations about him and more than a year before his recognition “foreign agent”.

Among the “foreign agency” certificates, we managed to find those in which people or organizations loyal to the Kremlin appear. On August 8, 2021, the employees of the GRFC wrote, for example, a report aboutformer co-host of propagandist Vladimir Solovyov on Vesti FM radio Anna Shafran, despite the fact that she publicly rejoiced when Alexander Nevzorov, Alexei Venediktov, Sergei Parkhomenko, Leonid Volkov and Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. added to the list of “foreign agents”. According to Shafran, these people “were engaged in wrecking against Russia.”

Did not escape the certificate and belonging to the “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin MalofeevTV channel “Tsargrad” and the public movement “Two-headed Eagle” headed by him. In October, references were drawn up about the “patriotic” publication Regnum and its then editor-in-chief Modest Kolerov. By the time of publication, none of them were recognized as “foreign agents”, but in November 2022, Kolerov was removed from his post, and journalist Marina Akhmedova became the new editor-in-chief.

***

In the summer of 2022, the head of Roskomnadzor Andrey Lipov fell under EU sanctions. And on December 16, Roskomnadzor itself was included in the EU sanctions list for pursuing a “state policy of censorship in relation to independent media.” The EU document also states that the RKN “is responsible for material support for actions that undermined the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”

Roskomnadzor’s “daughter” GRCHTS has so far managed to avoid sanctions.

Four days after the “Cyberpartisans” published screenshots of part of the internal documents of the GRCHTS, employees of the monitoring service actively discussed the “confession” that suddenly fell upon their enterprise in working telegram chats. “We came out of the shadows,” the duty specialist ironically. “Next, PMC GRCHTS and its own center. And a sledgehammer.”

The Main Radio Frequency Center did not answer any of Sistema’s questions.

Investigations based on the data set of the GRCHTS also came out at “Important stories” , “Mediazona” and “Agency”

source: currenttime

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