Good afternoon friends!
Let's talk about the essentials ... about information
From time to time, the media make stuffing that oh what a mess - the black market of information is thriving ... everyone is breaking through everywhere, the employees are "bad guys" - they endure everything ... in general, a complete nightmare ... And here everything is much more beautiful and simpler, the state structure "without pale", absolutely legally presents itself and sells everything about us with you.
The Meduza edition found out that the Research Computing Center under the Presidential Administration of Russia (GlavNIVTs) is creating systems for monitoring and de-anonymizing Internet users. Both government and commercial organizations have access to these systems.
GlavNIVTS has created several services:
"Media Monitoring" tracks publications and reposts in social networks, comparing them with specific users.
Sherlock contains detailed information about the citizens of Russia. Some of the data was taken from illegal databases sold on the black market.
PSKOV (High priority search engine) pulls data from the Tor anonymous network.
Poseidon monitors social networks, identifying publications and comments with extremist content.
Some of these products can be accessed on a commercial basis: Mediamonitor costs 6.5 million rubles a month, and Sherlock - 11.5 million rubles a month.
With the help of "Mediamonitoring" you can see the IP-addresses of users of social networks and, if desired, find out where the person of interest is physically. If the user has VPN enabled, the data will be incorrect.
Through "Sherlock" you can find the most detailed information about a person, if you know only his name and surname, city of residence, phone number or e-mail address. The dossier contains information transferred from both open sources (for example, social networks) and closed (databases from the traffic police, leaks from various sites, etc.) OGRN, phone identifier, domains and companies registered by a person, as well as information on criminal records. Sherlock includes another service - FaceRadar. This is an analogue of FindFace and FindClone, with which you can search for a person in the database by his photograph. "Sherlock" was created by analogy with the Palantir big data analysis system used by the American special services. In the same way, she knows how to build complex connections between people:
Employees of GlavNIVTs openly hold presentations of their products, stating that they can be used to check the reliability of clients and applicants for important positions. These services are used, among other things, to check employees of the presidential administration and the National Guard, in addition, they help weed out unreliable volunteers at events with the participation of Vladimir Putin. For example, if a volunteer has friends with people with the marker "terrorist", "anarchist", "libertarian", he is not allowed to such meetings.
GlavNIVTS has been working on these services since 2014, and in 2016 began offering them to commercial companies. Former employees of the center say that things are not going well now: there are few customers, the developments were costly and difficult to recoup. Many employees quit and now work as programmers in large companies (Rostelecom, Mail.ru and others). The Ministry of Internal Affairs did not want to buy Sherlock, considering it inexpedient to pay for the bases that are already available.
The slides from the presentation of the GlavNIVTs state that the center has access to the closed part of the Mail.ru Group API services (owns the Mail.ru mail service and the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki), as well as to the system of operational-search measures (incl. h. SORM-3, which involves the collection of data from all types of electronic communications, including the storage of traffic under the Yarovaya law). This could be a marketing gimmick, since SORM-3 is currently not operational, and providing access to such systems can be considered a violation of state secrets.
GlavNIVTs declined to comment on this investigation to Meduza, while the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the Presidential Administration and Mail.ru Group said that the information presented was untrue. Roskomnadzor did not respond to the request.
Let's talk about the essentials ... about information
From time to time, the media make stuffing that oh what a mess - the black market of information is thriving ... everyone is breaking through everywhere, the employees are "bad guys" - they endure everything ... in general, a complete nightmare ... And here everything is much more beautiful and simpler, the state structure "without pale", absolutely legally presents itself and sells everything about us with you.
The Meduza edition found out that the Research Computing Center under the Presidential Administration of Russia (GlavNIVTs) is creating systems for monitoring and de-anonymizing Internet users. Both government and commercial organizations have access to these systems.
GlavNIVTS has created several services:
"Media Monitoring" tracks publications and reposts in social networks, comparing them with specific users.
Sherlock contains detailed information about the citizens of Russia. Some of the data was taken from illegal databases sold on the black market.
PSKOV (High priority search engine) pulls data from the Tor anonymous network.
Poseidon monitors social networks, identifying publications and comments with extremist content.
Some of these products can be accessed on a commercial basis: Mediamonitor costs 6.5 million rubles a month, and Sherlock - 11.5 million rubles a month.
With the help of "Mediamonitoring" you can see the IP-addresses of users of social networks and, if desired, find out where the person of interest is physically. If the user has VPN enabled, the data will be incorrect.
Through "Sherlock" you can find the most detailed information about a person, if you know only his name and surname, city of residence, phone number or e-mail address. The dossier contains information transferred from both open sources (for example, social networks) and closed (databases from the traffic police, leaks from various sites, etc.) OGRN, phone identifier, domains and companies registered by a person, as well as information on criminal records. Sherlock includes another service - FaceRadar. This is an analogue of FindFace and FindClone, with which you can search for a person in the database by his photograph. "Sherlock" was created by analogy with the Palantir big data analysis system used by the American special services. In the same way, she knows how to build complex connections between people:
Employees of GlavNIVTs openly hold presentations of their products, stating that they can be used to check the reliability of clients and applicants for important positions. These services are used, among other things, to check employees of the presidential administration and the National Guard, in addition, they help weed out unreliable volunteers at events with the participation of Vladimir Putin. For example, if a volunteer has friends with people with the marker "terrorist", "anarchist", "libertarian", he is not allowed to such meetings.
GlavNIVTS has been working on these services since 2014, and in 2016 began offering them to commercial companies. Former employees of the center say that things are not going well now: there are few customers, the developments were costly and difficult to recoup. Many employees quit and now work as programmers in large companies (Rostelecom, Mail.ru and others). The Ministry of Internal Affairs did not want to buy Sherlock, considering it inexpedient to pay for the bases that are already available.
The slides from the presentation of the GlavNIVTs state that the center has access to the closed part of the Mail.ru Group API services (owns the Mail.ru mail service and the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki), as well as to the system of operational-search measures (incl. h. SORM-3, which involves the collection of data from all types of electronic communications, including the storage of traffic under the Yarovaya law). This could be a marketing gimmick, since SORM-3 is currently not operational, and providing access to such systems can be considered a violation of state secrets.
GlavNIVTs declined to comment on this investigation to Meduza, while the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the Presidential Administration and Mail.ru Group said that the information presented was untrue. Roskomnadzor did not respond to the request.
