The Internet in Russia is either the most efficient totalitarian tool or
the device by which totalitarianism will be overthrown. Perhaps both.
On
the eighth floor of an ordinary-looking building in an otherwise
residential district of southwest Moscow, in a room occupied by the
Federal Security Service (FSB), is a box the size of a VHS player marked
SORM. The Russian government’s front line in the battle for the future
of the Internet, SORM is the world’s most intrusive listening device,
monitoring e-mails, Internet usage, Skype, and all social networks.
But
for every hacker subcontracted by the FSB to interfere with Russia’s
antagonists abroad—such as those who, in a massive denial-of-service
attack, overwhelmed the entire Internet in neighboring Estonia—there is a
radical or an opportunist who is using the web to chip away at the
power of the state at home.
Drawing from scores of interviews
personally conducted with numerous prominent officials in the Ministry
of Communications and web-savvy activists challenging the state, Andrei
Soldatov and Irina Borogan peel back the history of advanced
surveillance systems in Russia. From research laboratories in Soviet-era
labor camps, to the legalization of government monitoring of all
telephone and Internet communications in the 1990s, to the present day,
their incisive and alarming investigation into the Kremlin’s massive
online-surveillance state exposes just how easily a free global exchange
can be coerced into becoming a tool of repression and geopolitical
warfare. Dissidents, oligarchs, and some of the world’s most dangerous
hackers collide in the uniquely Russian virtual world of The Red Web.
Inbunden. 370 sidor.
Boktitel: The Red Web. The Struggle Betwen Russia´s Digital Dictator´s and the New Online Revolutionaries Författare: Andrei Soldatov och Irina Borogan Bokförlag: Public Affairs
Författarna Irina Borogan (till vänster) och Andrei Soldatov på en bild från 2010 när de var i New York.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are cofounders of Agentura.Ru and authors of The New Nobility. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Moscow Times, Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, and BBC. The New York Times
has called Agentura.ru “a web site that came in from the cold to unveil
Russian secrets.” Soldatov and Borogan live in Moscow, Russia.
