A couple of months ago, I told you about one reliable case when security forces used a Telegram bot with personal data to de-register a person in Telegram. He was found out and fined under the article "discrediting the army" for a comment in a channel with regional news. A screenshot from the bot that local "security guards" used to find him was attached to the court materials.
Now it turned out that both officials and police officers get access to the system through public procurement, which, using all the same merged databases, allows them to dean users of Telegram. The system is called "Insider".
How bots and Insider Work
Telegram bots (the most famous is the "Eye of God") and the "Insider" system work on the same principle. Tens of millions of mobile numbers are uploaded to them (there are more than 76 million of them in Insider) from leaked databases. For example, in "Insider" — let me remind you that access to it is paid for with budget money! — these are Yandex databases. Food", Wildberries, "Sportmaster", "Sber.Thank you", "Moscow Electronic School", etc.
Then these phones are matched (matched) with the user id in Telegram. I'll translate it into Russian now.
User IDs linked to phone numbers in the Insider system
Even if you don't have a user name in Telegram, and your phone number is hidden, anyone can still find out your id — that is, the unique digital number of your account. You can see it manually in the link to your profile in the web version of messenger or in a third-party client. Bots and" Insider " take it automatically, and then check which phone corresponds to this id. Along with the phone number, the id is joined by the name, all known addresses, places of work, and other information from leaked databases.
Match id and phone — a long-standing vulnerability of Telegram, which Durov never completely eliminated: it helps to expand the user base (when a person puts Telegram, he sees which of his contacts are already in the messenger).
The Okhotnik system, which belongs to Rostec and is designed to deanonymize Telegram channel administrators, also works on a similar principle.
Who orders Insider
Government agencies — including regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs-purchase Insider as part of the Laplace Demon social media monitoring system.
The fearsome name "Laplace's Demon" is used in games, movies, and literature, but it is originally a thought experiment by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, a kind of anthem of "determinism": everything that exists has a cause, and the "Laplace Demon" is able to comprehend the causes of everything in the world. In the case of social networks, it is obviously assumed that no one will escape from this all-seeing eye.
With the help of the "Demon", the authorities can monitor certain groups/channels/accounts/chats in VKontakte, Telegram, and for some reason no one needs Livejournal. One of the tasks of the "Demon" is to search for activists of protest movements, record "network connections between activists" and search for any messages on a given topic.
Public chats from Telegram are uploaded to Insider: you can search for both keywords and, for example, view all public messages of a particular user.
Last year, contracts for the supply of the system were signed by at least three regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs — in Chechnya, the Amur Region and the Kamchatka Territory. "At least" — because I assume that some of the purchases of the "Laplace Demon" are hidden. Among the civilian customers of the system is the government of the Pskov region, and the government of the Orel region is about to conclude a contract (the technical task of the recently announced competition coincides with the technical tasks for the supply of the "Laplace Demon" for other government agencies). On average, one license costs 500 thousand rubles.
Who is the developer of Insider
We have already written about the "Laplace Demon" and its developer. This is 42-year-old Evgeny Venediktov. We started our career in Veliky Novgorod, where we worked on local TV and kept a crime story. Then he went to Moscow, worked for NTV, was an activist of the Liberal Democratic Party. In the 14th, he carried humanitarian aid to the LDNR.
At the end of the 14th, he was detained in Veliky Novgorod with 2.8 grams of heroin, put in a pre-trial detention center. There is no drug phobia in this, but I think it is important for understanding his biography. The following year, Venediktov received three years of probation with a probation period of 4 years. Venediktov will spend these four years developing and implementing a program to monitor social networks and search for "extremist and destructive content" there. And it will establish cooperation with the security forces.
Evgeny Venediktov
In fact, it was this program that he called the "Laplace Demon". In 2017, Novaya Gazeta wrote about him — the local center "E" informed Venediktov about the examples of "destructive content" found in social networks. A couple of years later, he took up deanon of Telegram users and even helped Medusa find the admin of the Comrade Major channel, where the data of protest participants was published. Venediktov himself said that he did this in exchange for advertising his system.
Search by Telegram comments in Insider
Then, in 2019, it had 10 million numbers in its database. Now — more than 76 million. This is understandable: from the large-scale leaks of personal data that occurred in 2022-2023, it is possible to create a digital portrait of almost all Russians. And in almost all cases, these leaks were the result of the Russian-Ukrainian cyber war, when Ukrainian hackers and their allies from all over the world broke the websites of government agencies and companies of the Russian Federation, and then published the downloaded databases in the same Telegram.
Venediktov himself did not answer my questions, which I anticipated with the phrase: "You'll check me out, so the introduction will be short."
Is all this legal at all
Despite the fact that screenshots from bots with personal data are posted even by State Duma Deputy Lugovoy, their use violates Russian laws — it's not for nothing that Roskomnadzor once chased after the "Eye of God", constantly demanding that Telegram block it. And now in the State Duma there is a bill to toughen the penalties for both using and creating resources with illegally obtained personal data.
But it turns out that in the case of the "Laplace Demon", state agencies and security forces pay budget money for using the system, which is based on leaked databases. However, this is all outrage for the sake of form: of course, nothing will be done to the security forces and officials for this. Moreover, they have already written about the fact that they use merged data in their work: another question is that now a system based on such databases is freely purchased through public procurement.
"For more effective deanon when using the system, we recommend that you update the Telegram user base in your region. This service is additional, it is often more expensive than the Insider license itself, but it increases the deanon several times," says Evgeny Venediktov, the creator of the system, in the demo video.
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In conclusion — an important point: although there are security forces among Insider's clients, I am not sure that they do not have their own similar state system, which, on the one hand, has all the known numbers of Russians from the internal databases of mobile operators, and on the other, the same mechanism for matching these phones with an id in Telegram is implemented. I haven't heard about it, but if you know something, please write to me in PM (the contact is in the channel profile).
This is an extended version of the post from the Telegram channel "Zakharov". If you like my work, you can support me with a Russian, foreign card, or cryptocurrency — all methods are listed here.
UDP. At 20.24 on March 6, it was clarified that the government of the Orel region has not yet signed a contract for the supply of the "Demon Laplace", but the technical task of the announced tender exactly coincides with the technical tasks for the purchase of a license for the system for other government agencies.
• Source:
https://telegra.ph/Siloviki-i-chino...zovatelej-Telegram-Za-byudzhetnye-dengi-03-06
