HOW VLADIMIR PUTIN LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE INTERNET
Russia is a military state and its destiny is to be the terror of the world.
—TSAR NICHOLAS I
A great paradox of Putin’s later reign is that as he moved away from the West after the events in Ukraine, he also began slowly, imperceptibly, to embrace the West’s defining modern invention, the Internet.
By its very nature, the Internet is everything Putin dislikes. It is infinitely horizontal while he prefers the Vertical of Power. The Internet decentralizes, Putin recentralizes. The Internet eludes control and so Putin prefers television, which is easy to manipulate. Television demands that you be in a certain place at a certain time—for the large number of the VCR-less in Russia—while with the Internet you can get your news whenever and wherever you please. Television is real, large, physical, the Internet insubstantial, somehow gay.
Putin never lost his respect for television. It had been a television miniseries, The Sword and the Shield, that had inspired him to become a KGB agent. It had been television that had won Boris Yeltsin reelection in 1996 when a Communist resurgence was very much in the offing. And it was television that won Putin his first election and every subsequent one. It is probably not coincidental that 80 percent of the Russian population get their news from television, and 80 percent is exactly the level that Putin’s popularity seems to hover at.
Putin had also felt the sting of television’s power every time the satirical puppet show Kukly came on showing him with a rubbery nose, too red lips, watery blue eyes. In 2002 it disappeared from the air.
Even the main crisis of his presidency—the economic suffering caused by low oil prices and Western sanctions—was described as a battle between the TV and the fridge, what Russian saw on the one and in the other.
In Soviet times, most of the televisions were made in the Gulag by prisoners known as Zeks. Those sets often caught fire or even exploded. Whether this was due to the Zeks’ indifference or to their malice will never be known. But Putin arose in post-Soviet times. The televisions were better and so were the production values. It was perfect for what Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center called “imitation democracies … television with fancy graphics but Kremlin-dictated scripts, elections with multiple candidates yet preordained outcomes.” As Stalin’s foreign minister Molotov had put it quite succinctly: “The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they’re going to turn out.”
Initially, it did not seem important to control the Internet—it was something only the urban intelligentsia cared about, like foreign films and foreign food. And the people involved in it as inventors and founders of companies were as alien as the Internet itself.
Pavel Durov was a perfect example. Born in 1984 of all years, Durov is habitually called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia for having created in 2006 the social media site V Kontakte (In Contact or In Touch, both translations are good). In time VK would outdo Facebook in Russia with 46 million monthly users as compared to Facebook’s 11.7 million. The year 2006 was a good time for the Internet in Russia—there was creative ferment among the young generation and benign indifference from the old. Durov said: “The best thing about Russia at that time was that the Internet sphere was completely not regulated. In some ways it was more liberal than the United States.”
From the start Durov embodied the anarchic spirit of the Internet, a Merry Prankster of high-tech. Handsome, raised in Italy, always dressed all in black, he “envisioned his country as a tax-free and libertarian utopia for technologists.” Durov identified himself as a libertarian, vegetarian, and pastafarian, a mock religion whose name is a blend of Rasta and pasta; it worships a supreme being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster and can involve the wearing of a colander on one’s head. As Durov said, “I like to make fun of serious things.”
One of Durov’s more colorful pranks was to fold 5,000-ruble notes, worth about $150 at the time, into paper airplanes and sail them out his office window in the Singer Building in St. Petersburg. Needless to say, fistfights broke out on the sidewalks below. (This is reminiscent of a scene in the 1959 novel The Magic Christian, by Terry Southern, a screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove, in which a malicious billionaire, Guy Grand, opens to the public a bubbling vat filled with animal excrement and cash.)
Some of Durov’s other antics did not sit so well with the international business community. A year after founding VK, Durov began allowing users “to upload audio and video files without regard to copyright. Such policies drew criticism from the United States Trade Representative and lawsuits from major record labels.” Later, Durov would admit to having been “very careless.”
But these were relatively small problems that were relatively easily finessed in that lax and open period of the Russian Internet. In fact, the years between the founding of VK in 2006 and 2013, when its forced sale to Putin’s cronies took place, could be called the Russian Internet’s “seven fat years.” (Is a footnote now necessary to explain that this is a biblical reference, not one to obesity issues?)
Things began to sour in late 2011 and early 2012, when, summoned by social media, hundreds of thousands streamed into the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest the rigged parliamentary elections and Putin’s return to the presidency after allowing Medvedev to pose as president while Putin retained all real power as prime minister, an arrangement that observed the letter of the Constitution while mocking its spirit.
Putin viewed those demonstrations against the background of the Arab Spring, which exploded from the same volatile mix of idealistic youth, social media, and high-tech gadgets. That quickly led to Mubarak’s overthrow in February 2011 and Qaddafi’s in late August. The sight of a member of his elite club of World Leaders dragged through the streets and then murdered did not sit well with Putin.
And the Americans were playing what Russia saw as their usual devious hypocritical games—abandoning some leaders, toppling others, always in the name of a democracy that never quite seemed to come or, if it did but produced the wrong results, such as an Islamist president in Egypt, that had to be repudiated at once.
In another perverse paradox, it was the ugly turn of events in 2011 that would inspire Durov with one of his most libertarian ideas. In December 2011 an OMON (SWAT) team was banging at Durov’s door demanding that he block access to opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Web site. Wishing to consult with his brother, Durov realized that he did not have any safe and secure way to do so. And thus was born the idea for Telegram, the encrypted communication app that he would create in 2013. In 2011 Durov still felt free enough to defy the Kremlin; he refused to close down Navalny’s Web site and tweeted a photo of a dog in a hoodie sticking out its tongue. He could still get away with such things in 2012, probably because Putin was more occupied with putting the screws on the actual opposition leaders rather than on those who allowed them to communicate freely.
The swing year was 2013. In August, after weeks in bureaucratic limbo, Edward Snowden left Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and accepted asylum in Russia rather than risk any further international travel. Durov, who called Snowden “my hero,” immediately offered him a job, which Snowden declined. In a gust of pro-Russian effusiveness, Durov said: “In such moments one feels proud of one’s country and regret over the course taken by the United States—a country betraying the principles it was once built on.”
In a perfect piece of chessboard symmetry, within a matter of months Durov the anti-Putin would be forced into exile and end up in the United States, working in secrecy and freedom in Buffalo, New York, on Telegram, his secure communication app. Putin had apparently decided that he didn’t need both Durov and Snowden on his side of the chessboard, especially with Durov offering Snowden work and lionizing him. Snowden’s value was not a matter of any intelligence bonanza—his value was purely symbolic, i.e., political—his presence would be a constant mocking of the United States’ impotence. In the meantime Putin’s cronies seized financial control of VK in a buyout that left Durov with something like $300 million to $500 million. That was money that could not be spent in prison, as Durov was reminded when a case of his driving over a policeman’s foot was concocted against him, the fact that Durov didn’t drive was hardly an obstacle.
Durov, now a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, leads a nomadic life, traveling from hotel to hotel, country to country, with a small band of devoted techies who helped him perfect Telegram. Though it quickly gained 100 million users a month, Telegram has yet to show a profit and costs Durov something like $1 million a month. Among the hundred million users of Telegram’s secure communication system were the ISIS jihadis who left 129 people dead in the November 2015 Paris attacks.
Snowden may yet prove to hold a surprise for Putin, who thus far has seen him pretty much as a godsend. Snowden provides Putin with cover for repressive actions against the Russian Internet. Granting Snowden asylum reverses the old Cold War paradigm in which persecuted Russian culture heroes like the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov were given shelter and freedom in the United States. Now in the IT twenty-first century, the most famous IT refugee is living safely in Russia, free enough even to criticize Putin from time to time—in August 2016 Snowden tweeted in response to new legislation increasing surveillance and sentences while reducing Internet freedom in Russia: “Putin has signed a repressive new law that violates not only human rights, but common sense. Dark day for #Russia.”
This is a rare enough occurrence if only because common courtesy, gratitude, and the instinct for self-preservation prevent Snowden from criticizing his host overmuch. Their relationship is at best an uneasy one. Snowden’s tenure in Russia is entirely based, like everything else, on the whims and interests of Vladimir Putin. Snowden is a chip that can be called in at any time—as part of a deal that, say, lifts sanctions and at least tacitly recognizes Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, a deal that will appeal much more to a President Trump than to a President Obama.
As far back as July 2015, when Donald Trump was only one of the many vying to be the Republican presidential candidate, he called Snowden a “total traitor,” adding enigmatically that Putin would immediately surrender Snowden to him: “If I’m president, Putin says ‘hey, boom—you’re gone’—I guarantee you that.”
On the other hand, Snowden is by his very nature a wild card. He may not be cooped up in two rooms like Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but when you are not free to come and go as you please, even the largest country in the world can start to feel confining. Snowden may yet once again do something bold and impulsive that snares the attention of the world.
Reluctantly, Putin was being pulled into the realm of cyberpolitics, which were proving every bit as important as geopolitics. That realm had already generated great wealth, great power, great names—Gates, Jobs, Snowden. And there was a new name on the rise—“Guccifer”—which as its creator would explain was a mix of “the style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer.” That creator was a Romanian hacker in his early forties by the name of Marcel Lazar. At the time of his arrest by Romanian authorities for cybercrimes in that country he gave as his profession unemployed taxi driver, which is about as unemployed as you can get.
Using nothing fancier than an NEC desktop and a feel for how people created passwords, he cracked the accounts of, among others, Colin Powell, Candace Bushnell, and Sidney Blumenthal, confidant and adviser to Hillary Clinton. In cracking Blumenthal’s account Guccifer was able to reveal that Clinton was using a private email account to conduct official State Department business, which led to an FBI investigation and haunted her throughout her presidential campaign.
Snowden had demonstrated how a state could be weakened by leaks; Guccifer had demonstrated how specific political figures could be weakened, not so much by the contents of their emails but by how they used the email system itself.
From the very start Putin had suspected that the Internet itself was a “CIA project,” one whose ultimate aim was to infiltrate and weaken Russia, if only because the last thing the West wanted was a strong Russia. Putin publicly voiced those suspicions in 2014 and soon thereafter began to take actions that would wrest control of Russia’s Internet away from the CIA and its various minions, witting and unwitting.
Sometime after being driven through the ghastly emptiness of Moscow’s streets to his inauguration in May 2012, Putin began to slip deeper into the twilight of paranoia. This is a state of mind in which outlandish fears can be both sincerely believed and cynically exploited for political purposes.
The Moscow street demonstrations could not have been the product of injustice and outrage—someone had to be behind them, since someone always was. In this case that someone was Hillary Clinton. Putin said: “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work.”
The Arab Spring, the Moscow protests, and the damage caused by Guccifer made Putin realize that he had underestimated the power of the Internet. His parliament at once began drafting bills for laws that required foreign social media websites to locate their servers in Russia and to retain all information about users for at least six months and make it available on demand to the authorities. Another law blocks Web sites entirely even without a court ruling. Another makes any blogger with more than three thousand followers bear the same level of responsibility as mass media companies, meaning he or she can face heavy fines for positing incorrect information. Nearly any expression of critical thought can be labeled “extremist” and punished as such. Denial-of-service attacks against opposition Web sites became more frequent. An army of well-paid trolls posted pro-Putin comments on Russian and Western news outlets.
In late 2015 Putin invited Herman Klimenko, a programmer and Web entrepreneur, to serve as his official adviser on the Internet. Born in 1966, Klimenko is closer in age to Putin than are most of those active in Russia’s Internet world. Balding, bearded, he has an avuncular twinkle in his eye and a wit that can cause him to refer to Russia ironically as a “banana republic,” but there is no doubt about his good-soldier attitude. In fact, his first statement about his decision to accept Putin’s offer was couched in military terms: “When I served in the army, there would be orders for officer appointments. Simply out of respect, you were given three days to weigh the orders. It was understood that, on the third day, the answer was always ‘yes.’”
And “yes” is the word Putin is most likely to hear from Klimenko, who quickly went on record as saying: “Now the Internet is flooded with money, and criminals, and terrorists. Of course, all this needs to be regulated.”
Klimenko went after Google and Apple in much the same way the EU has, demanding that they pay significantly higher taxes than they currently do. He summed the situation up rustically: “We are breeding the cow and they are milking it.” Klimenko has a strong ally in parliament who is sponsoring a bill that would impose an 18 percent value added tax on the revenue generated by Google, Apple, and other such companies. In the odd-bedfellows department, Klimenko’s ally in parliament is none other than Andrei Lugovoi, one of the two former KGB men accused of assassinating Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London in 2006.
In the three years between the Guccifer revelation of Clinton’s private email account and the Guccifer 2.0 hack of the Democratic National Committee, a great change took place within the citadel of Putin’s mind. His initial responses to the Internet were those that were to be expected—curtail and control. At first, he failed to appreciate the full potential of hacking, being more interested in the gems of useful information that could thus be obtained and in the bragging rights that came with it—Russia’s hackers are stronger than yours.
But in the case of the hacking of Sidney Blumenthal’s correspondence with Hillary Clinton, there was very little useful information, and the hacker himself was a Romanian, hardly an occasion for nationalist chest-thumping (though Guccifer did use a Russian proxy server).
It was true that all the emails from Blumenthal, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation, were marked “Confidential” and claimed to contain intelligence “from extremely sensitive sources.” But then something rare and difficult to grasp began to happen that took Putin time to understand: It wasn’t the stealthy skill of the hacker that mattered, and it wasn’t the “sensitive” intelligence that was splashed all over the world’s media that mattered. What mattered more than any of that was that Secretary of State Clinton was using a private server for official communications. It was the delivery system that counted, not the content. Once again the medium was the message.
Another new use for the Internet was found in connection with former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died so hideously and so publicly from polonium poisoning in London in 2006. In Putin’s eyes Litvinenko had committed three unforgivable sins. He betrayed the brotherhood of the KGB, the vilest of treasons. He incriminated Putin in the supposed FSB bombing of three residential buildings in 1999, which were to set the stage for the second Chechen war and thus strengthen Putin’s position as president. He accused Putin of being a pedophile.
No one can be more vicious in exchanging insults than ex-KGB. Their accusations should be considered baseless unless supported by hard evidence. There is some evidence that the FSB was involved in the detonation of the buildings, none whatsoever for Putin being a pedophile.
In April 2015 the British police brought six charges of “making and possessing” child pornography against Vladimir Bukovsky, an even less likely candidate for the charge than Vladimir Putin himself. Yet slander is adhesive.
Bukovsky was one of the great figures of the Soviet dissident movement, not as famous as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn—there is always a second tier—but greatly respected for what he endured, twelve years in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and for what he achieved as an activist and writer, especially for his memoir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. Bukovsky quipped about his literary output in Soviet-era samizdat (self-publishing): “I write it myself, censor it myself, print and disseminate it myself, and then I do time in prison for it myself.” He had been a dissenter since the Hungarian Uprising was crushed in 1956. “Our parents had turned out to be agents and informers, our military leaders were butchers, and even the games and fantasies of our childhood seemed to be tainted with fraud.”
In 1976 he was forcibly deported from the USSR in exchange for the leader of the Chilean Communist Party. He then devoted himself mostly to neurophysiology, working mainly in Cambridge University in England.
When Litvinenko defected to the UK in 2000, he made contact with Bukovsky, calling him some twenty to thirty times a day. And it was to Bukovsky that Litvinenko would reveal how assassinations were now casually arranged over a bowl of soup in the FSB cafeteria.
After Litvinenko was himself assassinated—Bukovsky was called to testify into the inquiry conducted by former judge Sir Robert Owen. Bukovsky’s conclusion was hardly a ringing condemnation: “I am pretty sure it was done on orders from the Kremlin.” Owen himself went further, naming names: “I have concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, then head of the FSB, and also by President Putin.”
A month after Bukovsky testified the British police brought the multiple child pornography charges against Bukovsky based on information received from Europol. For a man of Bukovsky’s proven integrity it was a particularly loathsome charge, one that would besmirch, if only by association, his last years of life.
Two things were clear to everyone but the British police: the child pornography had been planted in Bukovsky’s computer and the act was an obvious allusion to Litvinenko’s accusing Putin of pedophilia.
A year after the charges were brought against him, the British police forging ahead with their case, Bukovsky went on a protest hunger strike though he was in very poor health. He said of the possibility of dying: “I’m not afraid of it. How can you be afraid of something inevitable? It isn’t a senseless death. It’s a purposeful death. I’m an old man anyway.”
In May 2016, after three weeks of a hunger strike by Bukovsky and a great international outcry, a British court postponed the criminal case against him. Bukovsky intends to file a civil case against the prosecutors, who say they need more time to determine whether his computer could have been hacked, a task difficult but doable.
One thing is clear here, one isn’t. It’s clear that the FSB was no more a match for Bukovsky than the KGB was. Men with that diamond-hard integrity can be killed but not broken. What isn’t clear is how the example of the attack on Bukovsky might convince future Russia dissenters that the game is not worth the candle.
The FSB and its predecessors had always been adept at finding or manufacturing compromising material, kompromat, that could then be planted and later “discovered” when needed. Now the Internet provided a swifter, surer means—no need to break into an apartment; hacking into someone’s email was all it took. Hackers had found a new purpose—not only to steal but to leave real evidence of imaginary crimes behind.
On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump, a man of boundless ambition and self-love uncorrected by character or conscience, was elected president of the United States by both the American people and the intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation. Not to be outdone by foreign competition, the FBI had also rolled up its sleeves and gotten down to work to thwart Hillary Clinton’s run for president. Was this an early example of the renewed Russian-American cooperation Trump hinted at in his campaign?
Earlier in 2016 the Democratic National Committee’s email account was penetrated by a group that called itself Guccifer 2.0 in homage to the original Romanian hacker of that name. There is forensic evidence to support Guccifer 2.0 being run by the FSB with some involvement by Russian military intelligence. Though it is quite certain that the Russian government used hackers in an effort to tilt the American presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, a full picture will likely never emerge unless there is a brief opening of the secret police archives after the fall of Putin’s Russia as there was after the fall of the USSR.
These types of situations are always murky because four activities that are quite distinct in most countries—politics, crime, business, and the secret police—in Russia blur and merge, making them hard to tell apart. For example, cybercriminals arrested for bank fraud and extortion are offered a choice between fifteen years in prison with no access to computers or a five-year contract with the FSB as a hacker with access to unparalleled equipment and databases. One assumes they don’t agonize long. And those same hackers were exploited by Russian foreign policy when Putin discovered how effective an instrument of espionage and influence the Internet can be.
In any case, the Russian hackers gathered material on everything from what the DNC itself had gathered on Donald Trump to the emails that revealed a supposedly neutral DNC covertly working against Bernie Sanders. That latter revelation of compromised integrity caused the DNC’s chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. What mattered here was not the specific political fallout—Schultz was quickly thereafter reelected in her Florida district. Of more importance was that the DNC, and, Clinton’s campaign hacked later, was revealed as compromised and hypocritical, exactly the Kremlin critique of American democracy.
Putin was hardly indifferent to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The bad blood with Clinton went way back. Trump seemed easier to play. But more important to Putin than the winner of a particular election was the elective process itself. It needed to be revealed as unreliable, riggable if not rigged.
And for that reason the Russian hacking of the voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois in the summer of 2016 were more significant than the DNC break-in. The Washington Post called the Illinois hack “the first successful compromise of a state voter registration system” and the FBI rated the threat posed by a similar attack on the Arizona system as “an eight on a scale of one to 10.”
Showing the American electoral process to be vulnerable and therefore unworthy of trust weakens the United States at its very core. Putin wants a weaker United States because he sees ample evidence that the United States wants a weaker Russia. It’s his golden rule—do unto others as they would do unto you, and preferably before.
But Putin himself may also be vulnerable from within. Many of Russia’s freelance hackers partake of the political anarchism that seems inherent to the Internet. The main criminal/anarchist organization, known as Anonymous International or, more familiarly, as Humpty Dumpty, cracked into Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s twitter account and sent out the following message in his name: “I’m resigning. I am ashamed of this government’s actions. Forgive me.”
Other break-ins resulted in information with more substantial political content, e.g., concerning how the Kremlin prepared Crimea’s secessionist referendum.
Humpty Dumpty not only engages in pranks and politics but is known to have made significant money through blackmail and extortion. Its members glide easily from crime to business to work for the secret police and the Kremlin’s political aims. They have also displayed astonishing high connections in the Russian government. Sergei Mikhailov, the number two man in the FSB Information Security Center, was closely connected with Humpty Dumpty and may even have been running it. During a top-level FSB meeting in late January 2017 Mikhailov was arrested for treason and escorted from the meeting with a hood-like bag over his head.
The treason charges against Mikhailov include passing information to the United States. The U.S. intelligence agencies undoubtedly had such a high degree of confidence about accusing Russia of cyber involvement in the U.S. election not only because of forensic evidence but because they had people on the inside. That does not necessarily mean that Mikhailov was the CIA’s man. There are other candidates for that role, one of them already suddenly and conveniently dead.
Mikhailov’s arrest may also have been a message to the United States—the DNC break-in was a high-level rogue operation, not one approved and directed from the very top. The Kremlin wants the United States to buy this version of events so that diplomatic relations can improve. The United States may pretend to be mollified by this version, but hackers might not.
A member of Humpty Dumpty said the following in a 2015 interview:
INT: So, the only thing you won’t publish is personal data?
HD: And we’ll never publish state secrets.
INT: What if you had data like Snowden’s? Would you leak that?
HD: Most likely not. Not everything needs to be released.
INT: What if the data revealed crimes by the state?
HD: Then we’d release it.
The question that was not asked during that interview was—what sorts of information might you threaten to release if members of your group were arrested?
All such caveats and dangers aside, sometime between Guccifer and Guccifer 2.0 Putin switched from viewing the Internet solely as a threat to understanding it as a weapon that can be adapted and deployed for specifically Russian aims. It could damage political enemies, smear those who would testify against you, even destabilize an opponent’s political system. It was almost untraceable, utterly deniable, and wonderfully cheap. Who wouldn’t love such a thing?