Rusland

[henk vreekamp]

Ter lering voor de laatste digitale dwazen onder ons -
Internet misbruikt voor propaganda-oorlog verkiezingen

Sent: Friday, February 26, 1999 11:48 AM
From: nikst [mailto:nikst at glasnet.ru]
     Moscow Times, February 25, 1999
Web Site Serves Up Political Intrigue
By Natalya Shulyakovskaya
Staff Writer
     With elections approaching, Russia's political schemers are
using the World Wide Web to update the technique of kompromat,
the venerable tactic of dishing documentary dirt on business and
political competitors.
     The latest popular site is Kogot-2, or Claw
(www.krasnobykow.com), which provides a treasure trove of
purported secret files, police reports and intelligence analyses
on Krasnoyarsk governor and presidential hopeful Alexander Lebed
and his public enemy, aluminum magnate Anatoly Bykov.
     The site details what it says are links between Bykov,
various criminal groups and Moscow's powerful Mayor Yury Luzhkov,
another presidential hopeful.
     Internet scandal-mongering is not new - U.S. web gossip Matt
Drudge was the first to report the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton
scandal - but the current outburst is peculiarly Russian, with
heavy use of electronic eavesdropping and the intelligence
services lurking in the background.
     It's fascinating stuff - and almost totally unsubstantiated.
Theories abound about who is behind Kogot and other such sites
- could it be spies, political imagemakers, jittery journalists?
     "I think by election time, there will be a madhouse of such
rumors on the web," said Alexander Plushchev, a host of a daily
Internet review program on radio Ekho Moskvy. His program,
EkhoNet (www.echonet.ru), devoted the entire week of programs to
political provocations and scandals.
     Anton Nossik, webmaster for the Moscow News, said Moscow is
awash in legal and illegal surveillance by current, former and
would-be intelligence agents.
     "There is a ton of such material gathered around Moscow,"
Nossik said. "Private investigators are listening in, the secret
services are listening in, specialists paid for by the newspapers
such as Moskovsky Komsomolets are listening in. There are piles
and piles of such tapes lying around many offices.
     "And because any governmental organization is basically a
compilation of poorly paid workers, all these things can be sold
and bought."
     Unlike its predecessor, also called Kogot, the site is
hosted safely offshore, on a U.S. computer. The first Kogot
disappeared within a few hours of its debut Nov. 26 amid media
outcry and an investigation by the computer crime unit of the
Interior Ministry. Not only did the site mysteriously disappear,
but its Russian host computer was disconnected from the Internet,
the worldwide computer network.
     But before it disappeared, the first Kogot spread all kinds
of kompromat goodies: a long list of home addresses and phone
numbers of the Russian political and business elite; biographical
files on politicians including the interior minister and
prosecutor general; and transcribed pager and answering machine
messages for several influential public figures.
     For additional spice, it offered what it said was a
transcribed conversation between the politically-connected
billionaire Boris Berezovsky and Tatyana Dyachenko, President
Boris Yeltsin's daughter and image adviser. The information
itself did not vanish. Internet lurkers saved bits, pieces and
entire files and put them up on other web sites.
     The web, with its low cost and potential for anonymity, was
perhaps an inevitable destination for kompromat. Though the
immediate audience is limited to Russia's estimated 1 million
people with web access, newspapers and radio magnified the effect
by jumping on the Kogot story.
     Experts say there are numerous suspects: political spin
doctors working out new technologies for the upcoming elections
for parliament in 1999 and for the presidency in 2000;
intelligence agencies seeking to influence public opinion, or
journalists who need to distance themselves from tidbits leaked
from sources sitting in Kremlin offices.
     Nossik said one clear beneficiary of the hysteria
surrounding the Internet rumor mill is the Federal Security
Service, or FSB, successor to the KGB.
     The uproar could help it lobby for eased restrictions on
monitoring the web. Currently, the FSB has to get a warrant to
track electronic communication by individuals, but it is pushing
to gain automatic access to all web communications - without
warrants.
     The information on the first Kogot site looked genuine, said
journalist Alexander Minkin of Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's
best known investigative reporters. About a year's worth of his
private pager messages wound up on the first Kogot.
     "It was obviously information that came from my own pager,"
he said. "I could remember most of them. Some of them were
work-related, some were pages from family and friends.
     "No buts about it, these leaks will have the most grave
consequences for our society," said Minkin. "They demonstrate the
weakness of our government, the weakness of our law.
     "Just think about it: My personal messages get posted on the
web, and it goes unpunished and doesn't infuriate any one," he
said.
     But while Minkin was outraged, many other journalists used
the information without a second thought.
     In mid-December, another site, www.rumors.ru, appeared.
Although registered in Russia, it was located on a computer in
the United States where companies providing computer space for
web pages have more freedom and less responsibility for the
content of a site. In Russia, Internet providers could be held
responsible under Russia's more restrictive mass media laws.
     True to its name, the site was a warehouse of rumors about
the political elite, ranging from alleged links to criminal
groups to sexual orientation.
     The agency that claimed to have created the site, Slukhovoye
Okno or the Listening Window, advertised it on the popular search
engine rambler.ru and soon claimed high popularity.
     In two e-mail interviews with Russian media, the creators
of rumors.ru claimed to be four former analysts from the
presidential administration. The anonymous authors said they
simply wanted to give the Russian public "a quality information
product."
     But on Feb. 18, the site vanished. In a note, the creators
said they would be back in 3 or 4 days, but for now were yielding
to "unprecedented pressure from some of the subjects of the
rumors."
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