According to an article in the 14 May 2010 issue of Moscow newspaper “Trud”, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) are ramping up efforts to mine the Russian Internet for terrorists planning attacks similar to the Moscow subway bombing:

The special services are blanketing the Internet. As experts are asserting, the special services are immediately checking any information about terrorist acts that are in preparation, from whatever sources and no matter how improbable they may sound. Sergey Goncharov, the head of the Association of Veterans of the Anti-Terror Subunit “Alfa,” has told “Trud”: “The FSB and the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) have special technical subunits that track all operationally important information on the Internet in an on-line mode. This is now one of the most effective ways to keep track of extremist groups.” According to Russian Federation FSB official data, in 2010 ten terrorist acts were prevented in Russia. “Information regarding preparations for several of them were intercepted on the ‘Net,” Sergey Goncharov asserts.” (translation from the original Russian)

Mikhail Lukanin, who authored the article, goes on to relate an example from April, 2010 of the Lithuanian Security Service identifying and arresting Egla Kusaite, who had made online announcements to Chechen friends about her plans to conduct a terrorist action against a Russian military base in Kaliningrad Oblast.

The important take-away from this news story is that while the public focus is on terrorism, this collection involves “all operationally important information on the Internet”. GreyLogic analysts assess a high liklihood that SORM2 and other collection technology is being refined and upgraded to provide the security services with improved mining and analytic capabilities, not only for anti-terrorism efforts but intelligence gathering in general via the Internet, however Facebook technology appears to have been made available as well. Yuri Milner, the CEO of Digital Sky Technologies (DST), has been tasked by the Ministry of Communication to survey the Russian Internet for illegal content (such as child pornography) as part of an overall crackdown on social media sites hosting such content, such as vKontakte which Milner’s company Digital Sky Technologies owns. GreyLogic analysts found this paragraph which addresses copyright infringement particularly revealing:

The problem involved in copyright infringement lawyers social network, said a representative of the VKontakte. “Rights holders are sent an official request with evidence of its rights, after which the content is removed from the site,” says Vladislav Tsypluhin. “We have a Facebook algorithms to identify such content, plus a team of moderators, which is working on it”, – adds the head of the Facebook in Russia Ekaterina Skorobogatova. (machine translation)

If DST, which now owns 10% of Facebook, has access to its algorithms, and is using it in the service of a State Ministry, then certainly the FSB has access to that same Facebook technology. This confirms GreyLogic’s assessment of DST published in June 2009 which specifically warned of its potential to serve as an intelligence mining operation for the Russian government via its holdings of Facebook and other social media.

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This article is excerpted from GreyLogic’s cyber intelligence subscription feed: IntelFusion FLASH Traffic.