David A. Andelman

The State Department issued a travel warning for Americans that the Russians have an electronic eavesdropping system.

Called SORM%2C it has the ability to snag every password%2C sensitive file or other electronic communication within range.

Yet for the most part%2C SORM has been all but powerless to prevent those who are the greatest challenges to public safety.

Largely lost in the recent warnings of potential terrorist action against Americans and others at the Sochi Olympics is a year-old State Department advisory: If you come, the Russians will be listening in on you.

Last March, the State Departments' Bureau of Diplomatic Security issued a travel warning for Americans that the Russians have an electronic eavesdropping system every bit as pernicious, if hardly as sophisticated or omnivorous, as what's employed by our National Security Agency. Called SORM, or System of Operative-Investigative Measures, the network is straight out of James Bond with the ability to snag every password, sensitive file or other electronic communication within range.

"Travelers should be aware that Russian federal law permits the monitoring, retention and analysis of all data that traverse Russian communication networks, including Internet browsing, e-mail messages, telephone calls and fax transmissions," the State Department observed. Its conclusion? Don't bring any phone or computer with you, and if you do, don't take it home again. It likely will be corrupted.

Cold War mentality

The target of SORM is Russia's enemies, but, as the Sochi Olympics that is the focus of much of the world approaches, the Russians' problem is that they have their eyes on the wrong ones. Those enemies are religious, ethnic and cultural, not political.

Russian state security continues to waste resources monitoring the Americans, British and others as if the Cold War never ended, and as if personal or political enemies were a threat to President Vladimir Putin and the oligarchy through which he rules still-imperial Russia. But if the monitors happen to pick up chatter from some Islamic or similar elements, that could prove useful.

SORM, as a tool of Russia's counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and counterdemocracy operations, is a function of paranoia. Russian investigators and authors Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who have made a career out of penetrating the KGB's successor organization FSB, trace the eavesdropping system to a KGB research institute in the mid-1980s when it was developed to snoop on fixed and mobile phones. This capacity expanded to embrace the Internet.

Today, it can collect and trace virtually any electronic signal wherever it originates in Russia.

Leading up to the 2012 election that returned Putin to the presidency with a landslide vote, the resources of SORM were directed at his opponents and leaders of protest marches that flooded Moscow's streets. The "extremists" whom the court system allowed security services to target were leaders of the vocal, though hardly extremist, political opposition because their call to arms included restrictions on the power of the FSB itself.

Misplaced priorities

Today, the heart and soul of Russian monitoring, and a substantial percentage of the security services' resources, are devoted to neutralizing challenges from the Internet. As Soldatov and Borogan have reported, since November hundreds of websites have been effectively switched off — from satirical Australian YouTube videos to Absurdopedia. Along the way, they've managed to turn off a few scattered websites in the volatile North Caucasus, the source of the most potentially immediate threats to Olympic visitors and competitors.

Yet for the most part, SORM and those who make use of its technologies have been all but powerless to prevent those who are the greatest challenges to public safety in Russia from toying with the powers that be. On a regular basis, menacing videos appear on websites attributed to militant revolutionaries of Dagestan and the North Caucasus. Threats spread via viral e-mails to targets foreign and domestic.

The problem seems to be that Putin and his security minions are incapable of focusing their energies on the real threat. Moreover, the most immediate question is whether, given ever new challenges to all that Putin holds dear arriving with the Olympic flame, the FSB will be able to focus on threats that are truly existential rather than political.

Without question, SORM can help identify gay activists, pro-democracy advocates and other agitators, not to mention potential targets for future espionage successes in the form of American businessmen bearing laptops and smartphones.

The real challenge to Olympic security, however, will come not from the scattered protest signs or shouted slogans. It will come from a suicide vest strapped to the chest of a reputed "black widow" from Dagestan.



David A. Andelman, a member of USA Today's board of contributors, is the editor in chief ofWorld Policy Journal and author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.

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