"What are our security services even doing?" We ask ourselves this rhetorical question all the time when we read yet another newspaper story saying that "another billion has been stolen." I find myself asking it less and less, because I can already imagine that the security services are mainly occupied either with stealing yet another billion themselves, or with covering for those who do. Here’s an example from personal experience. Remember Yandex’s reply to one of RosPil’s donors. He was told that his account information had been requested by FSB counterintelligence. I submitted the same kind of request. And last week I got a reply too:
Well, well! So it wasn’t just FSB counterintelligence, but no fewer than two divisions of BSTM—the Bureau of Special Technical Measures, the formal name of the infamous Department “K” of Russia’s Interior Ministry. If you want to know what the federal branch of Department “K” is really like, ask any police officer, investigator, or prosecutor you know. In 95% of cases, the answer will be: they’re just gangsters. In theory, they deal with investigating high-tech crimes and all the wiretapping and so on. In practice, you can see it here. And of course here as well (a well-known case, but no one was ever punished). RosPil, for all its shortcomings, is still a project one can be proud of. A tiny handful of people, working with public donations and no official powers whatsoever, and yet look how badly it rattles the crooks in the Kremlin. The Russian security services have no task more important than keeping it under surveillance. And let me remind all the great enthusiasts of “modernization” that in our country, the Interior Ministry and the FSB answer not to the sinister Putin, but to someone else:
Well then, shall we write to the Guarantor of the Constitution (a common ironic reference to the Russian president) and ask who gave the order for these curious operational measures, and for what purpose? Let’s see whether he replies, or just forwards it to the same FSB and Interior Ministry—as he usually does...