When Kazakhstani computer programmer Alexandra Elbakyan learned recently that she had been targeted for investigation by the US Department of Justice, she says she wasn’t particularly surprised.

“I suspected that the US government was investigating a long time ago, because that is obvious, that a project like Sci-Hub would look suspicious to them,” Elbakyan told Quartz. “But I did not have any information about this.”

Elbakyan, a notorious and self-admitted hacker, is the creator of Sci-Hub, a free collection of scientific journal articles—tens of millions of them—that are normally locked behind a paywall. Sci-Hub offers 85.2% of all paywalled journal articles in the world, and more than 97% of those published by Elsevier, the largest science publisher in the United States. There are at least 373 universities in 39 countries with networks that Sci-Hub has penetrated. Last week, allegations emerged that Elbakyan hacked into the systems of 39 British universities.

Citing sources inside the agency, the Washington Post last week reported that the Justice Department had opened an investigation into Elbakyan. According to the Post, US authorities believe Elbakyan has links to Russian intelligence, in part because the sheer scale of Sci-Hub’s activities make it likely she is acting with the tacit approval, if not the assistance, of the Kremlin. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Quartz’s request seeking confirmation that it is investigating Elbakyan’s activities.

However, in a series of email messages, Elbakyan insisted that Sci-Hub, which she launched in 2011, “is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country’s intelligence.”

“But of course, there could be some indirect help,” Elbakyan conceded. “The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I’m simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I’m doing the server’s configuration.”

Sci-Hub, Elbakyan emphasized, is “funded from donations and my personal money and time.”

Elbakyan, who is suspected to be living in Russia, declined to provide the Post with her whereabouts, and did not volunteer any clues in her correspondence with Quartz.

A matter of perspective

Sci-Hub, according to the magazine Science, is either “an awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on whom you ask.” To some, Elbakyan—who has been compared to Edward Snowden by The New York Times—is a champion of transparency, earning her the nickname, the “Robin Hood of science.” To others, Elbakyan is a rogue hacker who stole the login credentials of scientists and academics across the globe, and is brazenly violating copyright law in full view.

“Why Sci-Hub is considered to be illegal?” Elbakyan wrote on her blog last year. “Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.”

Elbakyan has described being stymied by paywalls as a university student, and was “shocked” that a torrent site offering free downloads of the costly materials didn’t exist anywhere.

“Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research,” Elbakyan wrote in a letter to Robert Sweet, the judge overseeing a 2015 copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Elsevier against Elbakyan, Sci-Hub, and two similar organizations. “I obtained these papers by pirating them. Later, I found there are lots and lots of researchers (not even students, but university researchers) just like me, especially in developing countries…After that, I created sci-hub.org website that simply makes this process automatic and the website immediately became popular.”

Two years later, the court ruled in Elsevier’s favor, awarding the company $15 million in damages. Elbakyan has said she cannot, and will not, pay.

Sci-Hub accepts donations but does not “pressure anyone” for money, Elbakyan said in a 2018 blog post. She called Elsevier a “racket” by comparison, demanding payment for access to scientific knowledge. “On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will,” Elbakyan wrote. “Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?”

No black-and-white

Is Sci-Hub simply Wikileaks in a lab coat, designed to help Russia attain its geopolitical goals in the 21st century? It’s impossible to know with certainty, just yet. But Jan Neumann, a former officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service who defected to the United States in 2008, said that “only an idiot wouldn’t utilize such [a site]…to screw your ‘chess game partners.’”

Neumann suspects that Russia is directly or indirectly “manipulating or playing and provoking with the ‘freedom of info’ theme.” When it comes to espionage, end goals are not always obvious. But an outlet that pokes a stick in the eye of the western scientific establishment while at the same time doing economic damage in the name of “open access” can be a useful tool for an adversarial intelligence service. If nothing else, it’s a way to foment social division between those who see Elbakyan as a criminal, and those who see her as a hero.

“Basically, US officials have finally realized how strong and effective Russian cyber and tech capabilities are and the US has to step in with some radical moves,” Neumann said. “Such as, cut off the US market to some foreign tech companies, move servers back to US soil, bring back production of chipsets and processors to the US, prohibit use of some apps and software.”

In the world of spies and spycraft, smoking guns are few and far between, said Bob Baer, a former CIA case officer who spent 21 years in the agency’s Directorate of Operations. Only rarely do operatives get caught meeting handlers or case officers from adversarial spy services, or receive direct, traceable payment for their assistance. Oftentimes, an asset isn’t even aware he or she is working for a foreign intelligence agency due to the network of go-betweens, or “cutouts,” they use to maintain plausible deniability.

“This is what makes it so hard to pin this stuff down. You don’t know who they are, but they often report to the SVR or FSB,” he said, using the acronyms for Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence services. “I think it’s unlikely that some [Russian intelligence] guy showed his credentials to [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange, but you find these ‘fellow travelers,’ give them some money, and they sort of look the other way. It’s amazing what people give up when they don’t see a clear link [to another country’s spy agency].”

The FBI is the main US agency tasked with domestic counterintelligence. A former senior US intelligence official who spoke to the Washington Post believes Elbakyan is specifically working with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency and the entity accused by the US intelligence community of pilfering emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and then funneling them to WikiLeaks in an attempt to damage Hillary Clinton’s election chances.

For his part, former FBI agent Dennis Franks believes there is almost certainly a connection of some sort between Sci-Hub and the Kremlin.

“It’s clear to me that anyone or organization that has computer servers based in Russia, and is in the business of using stolen credentials to conduct intrusions of 150 or more confidential university accounts in the United States, is at a minimum being co-opted by Russian intelligence services—and is in my estimation likely designed from the outset by Russian intelligence services such as the GRU,” Franks told Quartz. “Unfortunately, it is another example of how successful they have been currently.”

In the meantime, whatever the actual connection between Sci-Hub and the Russian security apparatus, if one indeed exists, is almost irrelevant, Neumann said.

“How are you going to prove it’s not true?” he asked. “What can she do to clean her name?”

If the US declassifies the evidence it has on Elbakyan’s involvement with Russian intelligence, it would likely enable Russia to figure out how their American counterparts got the information. This, according to Neumann, could seriously harm ongoing US intelligence and counterintelligence operations and help the Russians better hide their future work.

“It’s nonstop,” Neumann said, “this cat-and-mouse game.”