Inside the Red Web: Russia's back door onto the internet – extract

In 1998 the diminutive Vika Egorova was a 24-year-old editor at an obscure magazine. She had studied at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, a preeminent school for training nuclear scientists, and had an interest in mathematics.

After graduating, she worked at a risk management company run by former KGB people, then was hired as an editor at Mir Kartochek, or World of Credit Cards. The circulation was tiny, but Egorova’s interests ranged beyond credit cards; she began learning about secret codes and developed contacts in the world of cryptology, the science of creating and deciphering clandestine messages.

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In June she received a call from one of her contacts who worked for a small information security company. Egorova sensed the small company was related, somehow, to Fapsi, the Russian electronic intelligence agency modelled after the US National Security Agency.

Egorova knew that Fapsi was fighting the more powerful FSB, the main successor to the KGB. The intelligence services jostled with each other in a competition for power and money and especially fought for control over profitable businesses, such as encryption technology that the banks were required to buy from the secret services.

Egorova’s contact offered some information about credit card technology that might interest her magazine, so on June 10 she went to meet with him. He handed her several pages of documents, but when she scanned them quickly, she saw that the first page obviously had nothing to do with credit cards.

It was an official document of some kind, a draft with places for signatures — still blank. But at the very top of the draft was the word soglasovano, or “approved”.

The draft document described a government policy that would require all of Russia’s ISPs to install a device on their lines, a black box, that would connect the internet provider to the FSB. It would allow the FSB to silently and effortlessly eavesdrop on emails, which had become the main method of communication on the internet by 1998.

The device was called Sorm, an acronym in Russian for Systema Operativno-Rozysknikh Meropriatiy, or the System of Operative Search Measures. The document said that Sorm was “a system of technical means for providing investigative procedures on electronic networks”. More simply, eavesdropping on the internet.

“Do what you want with that,” her contact said of the papers, suggesting she might pass them along to her editor at the magazine or give them to an editor at Computerra, another computer weekly popular among Russian programmers.

Egorova realised the documents were a leak — a leak probably from Fapsi, intended to unmask the FSB’s plans to monitor all of the Russian internet. As she left the meeting, Egorova was uncertain what to do. But she knew she had to do something – and quickly.

She called her editor, who was out of town. She called her contact at Computerra, who was also out of town. Then she remembered Anatoly Levenchuk. She had met him only a few months beforehand, and his combative debating style had impressed her. Maybe he would know what to do with the information.

In Russia Levenchuk, then 40 years old, had become something of a legend in the early days of the internet and was a well-respected expert in the Russian stock market. But Levenchuk’s real passion was ideas. He had become a devoted follower of libertarianism, and he firmly believed in the smallest possible government intrusion into the economy.

He attempted to launch a libertarian political party in 1992, but it flopped and never got on the ballot. The ideas of libertarianism and freedom from government control were not widely or immediately grasped, and Levenchuk felt it needed to be explained to the Russian citizenry. With the arrival of the web, Levenchuk found the answer.

In 1994 he established Libertarium.ru, a website that grew into an important source of libertarian ideas, a place for debate about freedom, and a launching pad for various public campaigns for change. He was often invited to speak at conferences, and when he gave a talk, he would immediately stand up, walk onto a stage, and wave his arms for emphasis, with his sentences laden with an evocative Rostov accent, which was much more emotional than Moscow’s everyday idiom.

Egorova called Levenchuk at home and said she needed to have a “serious talk” with him. He picked up her worried tone and suggested they meet. There, she showed him the papers. “Look,” she said. “It seems I’ve got a leak, and I don’t know what to do with it. But I think you should know what to do with that piece of paper.”

She had a hard time persuading him at first; Levenchuk’s mind was wrapped up in a battle over the rules of the stock market — fighting with Fapsi, which wanted to make all stock market details as secret as possible. Levenchuk insisted that openness was essential in capital markets — it was the pillar of how a free market worked. ...