DoD and IC employees on Facebook and MySpace. This new Russian law may impact you.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 08:05 Written by Jeffreycarr Tuesday, 29 September 2009 03:46

While the U.S. Department of Defense has mixed feelings about how to manage OPSEC violations by its service members on the Internet, the Kremlin has the same problem, only we suspect on a much larger scale. For example, in a recent OPSEC exercise conducted on the Russian Internet (RUNET), GreyLogic/Project Grey Goose investigators pulled the following maps, plus about 40 others, from RF social networking Web sites:

• N Caucasus military region forces and Kaspian Navy fleet
• 2nd Special Forces division of FSB-GRU
• The location of the Heavy Navy Carrier “Admiral Gorshkov”
• The location of the Akula Submarine K-152 Nerpa (SSN)

Awhile back, the FSB banned active duty members of the RF Armed Forces to post to sites like Odnoklassniki.ru. It didn’t have much of an effect though.

Today, the RF Ministry of Justice published a draft law “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Russia on the security of state information resources“. It specifically addresses gaps in existing criminal law that fail to address the problem of anonymity on the Internet as well as the relatively new phenomenon of social networks:

The practice of the federal executive authorities in the field of information security shows an increasing trend of use capabilities of the network “Internet” in illegal activities. Normative legal regulations currently do not fully conform to the existing threats in the information sphere. The current mechanism of self-regulation in this area are not able to protect the individual, society and state in the condition of anonymity. In this regard, proposed to the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection” on the rules of registration of domain names in the national domains Russia.

To create conditions for an effective response to illegal activities carried out via the Internet, you must introduce state regulation of social relations associated with the use and management of the network on the territory of Russia, the operation of the domain name system in the national domains, Russia, the definition of basic concepts.

To enhance enforcement, it provides, among other things, that “Operators of Internet service providers operating in Russia’s Internet segment, are required to provide public authorities carrying out operative-search activity or security of Russia, information about users and provides them with the use of Internet services, as well as other information necessary to to carry out tasks of these bodies in cases stipulated by RF legislation.” (via Google Translate)

I’ve captured the original document here and a machine translation version can be read here.

Perhaps it’s the poor quality of the machine translation, but it sounds to me like foreign companies who provide ISP services inside the Russian Federation would be subject to this law as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this extend beyond Internet Service Providers to include U.S. social software sites that operate inside the RF such as Facebook and MySpace. And if that’s true, then theoretically the FSB can require Facebook and MySpace to provide information about users that they deem a threat to Russian security.

How many DoD and IC users do you think we have on those two social networks today? Tens of thousands? What is Facebook going to do if the FSB demands private information on a Facebook user that they deem represents a threat to RF security, particularly since Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian company whose owners have strong ties to the Kremlin, have recently invested $200 to $300 million in the company?

If Skype’s actions are any indication, Facebook will accommodate the requests of governments within whose borders they operate. Unless I’m grossly mistaken about the intent of this new law, and I very well may be, this represents a serious development that the U.S. government needs to address as regards its employees engaged in classified or sensitive work posting to these sites at all.

The Friday Brief

Last Updated on Saturday, 19 September 2009 12:00 Written by Jeffreycarr Friday, 18 September 2009 11:11

Looking back over the week, here are a few things that caught my eye, and one small rant:

1. The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting It Right (a Brookings Institution report that makes a lot of good points, especially about the IC reducing its reliance on Classified sources)

2. Marina Litvinovich’s LiveJournal blog – a fascinating woman who used to work for Gleb Pavlovsky and supported Putin until she had a change of heart, got beat up for it, and is now a vocal opponent of the Putin/Medvedev Kremlin.

3. Has anyone attended the ECIW conferences? Greece hosts it in the summer of 2010. Abstract submission deadline is 10 December 2009. Hmmmmmmm….

4. “That’s it. You said the “F” word. We’re done here.” I actually had a United airlines supervisor tell me that after my first flight had to return to the gate due to mechanical problems, got rebooked on another flight leaving in 20 minutes, raced to the other side of Dulles airport, made it with 8 minutes to spare, had a United Airlines person tell me that I couldn’t board the plane because I didn’t have a boarding pass for this flight (only for my flight with the overheated brakes), and then walked onto the jet bridge and shut the door behind her, while I watched the last flight to Seattle pull away from the gate with me not on it. Ten minutes later, when I finally found a supervisor and had the audacity to ask him what United Airlines was going to do for me since it was their FUCK-UP, he actually jerked back as if in shock and said “That’s it! You said the F word!” and walked away.

Un-f’ing-believable.

Israel and the Russian Federation share a common Cyber strategy

Last Updated on Sunday, 2 August 2009 10:02 Written by Jeffreycarr Sunday, 2 August 2009 10:02

Apparently the Israeli government and the Kremlin are both engaging nationalistic netizens to post pro-Knesset and pro-Kremlin views on any Internet forum or blog post that expresses anti-government sentiment.

I just came across this article of a few days ago which discusses in detail Israel’s plans to launch what the writer of the article calls an “Internet Warfare Team” to spread a positive Israeli message throughout the Internet on selected topics chosen by the Foreign Ministry.

Chief Kremlin Ideologist Vladislov Surkov promoted a similar concept last March to “Ensure the domination of pro-Kremlin views on the Internet” (The New Times Online, 16 Feb 09).

One of the costs to governments of adopting this kind of overt strategy to control the information space is that they begin to lose their plausible deniability when their netizens move from “spontaneously” attacking ideas to organizing attacks against opposition Web sites.