Surveillance Center. A special department of Roskomnadzor controls the conversations of Russians about the war and Putin on the Internet.
Investigation “System”
Daniil Belovodiev with the participation of Anton Baev (investigative project “System”)
February 8, 2023
In November 2022, the Belarusian hacker group “Cyberpartisans” hacked into one of the structures of Roskomnadzor – the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC). Hackers handed over to Sistema journalistsarchive of documents and letters downloaded from the servers of the center. These documents prove that a little-known enterprise plays a key role in the total state surveillance of Russians on the Internet, censors independent media, composes and sends denunciations to the Ministry of Justice about potential “foreign agents”. The specialists of the center collect “fakes” about the Russian army in social networks (including in the occupied territories), help Yandex remove information about the crimes of the Russian military in Ukraine, train neural networks to look for insults against Vladimir Putin and cartoons depicting the president as a vampire or a crab. To simplify surveillance of citizens, the GRCHTS has developed a secret messenger, which is used by employees of the entire power bloc
However, for a large-scale cleansing, Roskomnadzor (RKN) did much more than can be learned from their public registers of sources of information objectionable to the authorities. “Important stories” got access to the largest data leak in the history of the main censorship department of the country – “Documents of Russian censorship”. The journalists studied more than two million internal documents, images and letters of the RKN subsidiary – the “Main Radio Frequency Center” (GRFC). It is the GRCHTS that monitors the Internet, prepares certificates for foreign agents and reports on the found “forbidden information”, as well as blocking.
We tell how the structures of Roskomnadzor on the eve and during the war stamped hundreds of certificates to recognize Russians as foreign agents, blocked the media in dozens, participated in information campaigns against people objectionable to the authorities, and for those who were pleasing, they cleaned up unflattering publications about them.
In this text you will learn:
- for whom Roskomnadzor prepared certificates for recognition as a foreign agent and why these people have not yet been included in the official register;
- how the RKN tries to censor IT giants (YouTube, Google, etc.);
- with whom the locks are coordinated;
- how the RKN participates in information campaigns against people objectionable to the authorities.
