I used to often say: who would even care about you? No one is wiretapping you. But after looking at these numbers and reading this post, I won’t be saying that anymore.
Russian courts issued nearly a million wiretapping warrants for Russian citizens in 2015. Judging by the trend, this year the number will exceed one million. And that is not the number of phones, but the number of individual “persons.”
There are 111 million people over the age of 18 in Russia. But the share of those being wiretapped is better calculated as a percentage of the economically active population (76 million people), as the author of the table did. The scale on the right shows that 1.15% of the economically active population is being wiretapped.
And Volkov is right here: if you use a phone or SMS at all and have a normal, ordinary social circle, then there is an almost 100% chance that at least one of your conversations (or text exchanges) was recorded and listened to over the course of a year.
And if you have even the slightest reason to suspect the authorities are tapping your phone, don’t doubt it—they are.
Especially since these official figures do not include wiretapping carried out without court authorization (as we know, the SORM system — Russia’s lawful interception system — makes that easy), as well as various forms of surveillance conducted in the interests of intelligence and counterintelligence. For example: you traveled to Syria, you communicate with foreigners, you studied at a madrasa abroad, and so on.
These numbers are incredible. You can compare them with the United States, where there also seem to be plenty of people who like listening in on phone calls:
Federal and state judges together issued 4,148 warrants in 2015.
That means Russia’s figure is 204 times higher.
Quite apart from the sheer insanity of this number—and the insanity of the Russian court system, which rubber-stamps wiretapping warrants by the hundreds of thousands—two other things are striking:
How can anyone actually listen to these millions of conversations? Simply using automated analysis to search for words like “bomb,” “heroin,” “ISIS,” and “Putin is a thief” is pretty stupid. You won’t find anything that way, and the American experience is a case in point: they recorded conversations of terrorists planning to hijack planes, yet still failed to make use of that information. How many staff would it take to listen to all this? And how many translators? Are these terabytes of information being recorded “just in case”?
What kind of terrible crimes is every hundredth citizen supposedly involved in, such that they need to be wiretapped? From my own experience, I can say that once authorization is granted, it covers everything at once: mail, phone, messages, electronic communications.
So does that mean there are a million people walking the streets suspected of involvement in serious crimes? And that is only what has been identified. Add in the criminals who are still unknown, and you get two or three million. Terrifying way to live—wherever you go, criminals everywhere.
In short, the explanation, as usual, is simple: ~~gracelessness~~ the courts, which are in effect part of an inefficient policing system, rubber-stamp wiretapping warrants because the “authorities” have long since forgotten how to do anything else. Look at the materials in any criminal case: everything is always built around phone geolocation and wiretaps. And yet 99% of that information still cannot be used effectively by definition.
Still, they are listening to everyone. Paranoid people, you were right. Sorry I didn’t believe you.
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