Out of the blue Wikileaks has just published part 5 of their Spy Files series of documents called Spy Files Russia. These new documents expose the mass surveillance operations of the FSB and the Interior Ministry of Russia and reveals the techniques they employ to spy on mobile and internet users.

The documents have come from Russia's largest telecommunications billing provider, PETER-SERVICE. With 25 years of experience and over 200 million daily subscribers across 14 countries, PETER-SERVICE are a major supplier of software for Russia's mobile telecommunications industry and are perfectly positioned to perform mass surveillance on behalf of the Russian government.

^Source

Peter-Service is the first Russian developer of billing systems and a leading developer of software products for the telecommunications industry in Russia and CIS countries. Since our inception in 1992, we have been building, charging and business management solutions for telecom operators.

PETER-SERVICE's unique position in the industry and the unrivaled visibility of cell phone subscriber data that there products give them means that they have access to vasts amount of internet and cell data from a number of Russian telecoms providers. Among the data the company has access to are phone and messaging records, device identifiers (IMEI, MAC addresses), IP addresses, and cell tower information. Data such as this is extremely valuable to any government agencies that want to perform mass surveillance on their citizens. According to Wikileaks Russian authorities access to the data became a "core component of the system architecture".

Here is a translated version done by my good Steemit friend @dimarss. Thank you pal.

The base architecture of PETER-SERVICE software (SVC_BASE) includes components for data retention (DRS), long-term storage in SORM (SSP, Service СП-ПУ) Russia's surveillance infrastructure, IP traffic analysis (Traffic Data Mart, TDM) and interfaces (adapters) for state agencies to access stored data. Below is a rundown by Wikileaks of some of the more technical systems and terminology from the documents.

Traffic Data Mart (TDM)

The Traffic Data Mart is a system that records and monitors IP traffic for all mobile devices registered with the operator. It maintains a list of categorized domain names which cover all areas of interest for the state. These categories include blacklisted sites, criminal sites, blogs, webmail, weapons, botnet, narcotics, betting, aggression, racism, terrorism and many more. Based on the collected information the system allows the creation of reports for subscriber devices (identified by IMEI/TAC, brand, model) for a specified time range: Top categories by volume, top sites by volume, top sites by time spent, protocol usage (browsing, mail, telephony, bittorrent) and traffic/time distribution.

Data Retention System (DRS)

The data retention system is a mandatory component for operators by law; it stores all communication (meta-)data locally for three years. State intelligence authorities use the Protocol 538 adapter built into the DRS to access stored information. According to PETER-SERVICE, their DRS solution can handle 500,000,000 connections per day in one cluster. The claimed average search time for subscriber related-records from a single day is ten seconds.

Service СП-ПУ

In SORM call monitoring functions are concentrated in control points (пунктах управления, ПУ) which are connected to network operators. The Service СП-ПУ is a data exchange interface based on HTTPS between components in SVC_BASE/DRS and SORM. The interface receives search requests from state intelligence authorities and delivers results back to the initiator. Search requests for lawful interceptions (based on a court order) are processed by the operator on the same system.

You can find the full rundown of the document archive here:

https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

This isn't much of a surprise as most of us probably already know this kind of thing happens in every country around the world. But this is the first time Wikileaks has published such comprehensive documents relating to Russia and their spying activities. Since the release of the DNC archives there has been much speculation and accusations by Hilary Clinton supporters that Wikileaks is run by the Russian government and I suspect this still won't change their minds. But who knows, we'll just have to wait and see.

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