It’s unclear whether Elbakyan is using Sci-Hub’s operations in service of Russian intelligence, but her critics say she has demonstrated significant hacking skills by collecting log-in credentials from journal subscribers, particularly at universities, and using them to pilfer vast amounts of academic literature.

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The investigation has both criminal and intelligence-gathering elements, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing probe.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said he believes Elbakyan is working with Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, the same organization that stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and then provided them to WikiLeaks in 2016.

Elbakyan denied ever working for Russian intelligence but said she was not surprised to be investigated by U.S. authorities.

“I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years,” Elbakyan said in response to written questions from The Washington Post. “But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.”

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Elbakyan’s work has been the subject of legal and ethical controversy. In 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million in damages to Elsevier, a leading science publisher, for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and other sites.

“I think that whether I can be a Russian spy is being investigated by U.S. government since they learned about Sci-Hub, because that is very logical: a Russian project, that uses university accounts to access some information, of course that is suspicious,” Elbakyan said via email. “But in fact Sci-Hub has always been my personal enterprise.”

News reports and court filings have said that Sci-Hub’s servers are based in Russia. And experts who have been tracking the development of the site said they believed Elbakyan is living in the country now. (She declined to provide her whereabouts.)

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“I’ve always considered myself to be Russian: my native language is Russian,” Elbakyan said. “Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.”

Federal investigators have been examining Elbakyan’s possible links to the GRU since as early as 2014, said another former U.S. official.

Elbakyan started Sci-Hub in 2011, when as a young graduate student she grew frustrated by the steep prices academic publishers charged.

“Journal paywalls are an example of something that works in the reverse direction, making communication less open and efficient,” she told Science magazine in 2016.

Sci-Hub has made millions of documents available to users around the world, said Andrew Pitts, the managing director of PSI, an independent group based in England that advocates for legitimate access to scholarly content.

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Pitts said there are 373 universities in 39 countries “that have suffered an intrusion from Sci-Hub,” which he defined as “using stolen credentials to illegally enter a university’s secure network.” More than 150 of the institutions are in the United States, Pitts said.

The immense scale, and popular appeal, of Elbakyan’s work has made her notorious.

“She is the Kim Dotcom of scholarly publications,” said Joseph DeMarco, an attorney in New York who represented Elsevier in its lawsuit against Elbakyan. (Dotcom ran a famous file-sharing site that U.S. authorities said violated copyright law.)

“We know she obtains purloined credentials belonging to students and faculty,” DeMarco said. “She’s careful to say she doesn’t steal them, but she does say she uses credentials belonging to others to gain access to digital libraries that belong to universities. What’s abundantly clear is she knows darn well the scheme depends on the use of other people’s log-in credentials.”

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Pitts agreed that Elbakyan had obtained credentials illicitly.

“We’ve seen phishing, that’s most common,” he said, referring to the use of deceit to trick someone into providing a username and password. “But also password-breaking,” Pitts added, suggesting Elbakyan uses more-aggressive hacking techniques.

“I do not deny that some accounts that Sci-Hub is using were obtained” in such a way, Elbakyan said, but she declined to elaborate on how she comes by credentials.

The scale of Elbakyan’s operation has led experts to conclude that she is not operating alone and must have the approval of the Russian government.

“If you’re doing business in Russia,” Pitts said, “if you have an organization like Sci-Hub getting so much press and activity and causing such a stir, there’s no way the authorities are going to allow that to happen without them having some part of it.”