Violations were revealed by the Prosecutor General's Office, the Anonymous Prosecutor channel reports. The supervisory authority found that the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent requests containing confidential information to organizations via e-mail, faxes, instant messengers and other means of communication. Such channels, according to the conclusion of the Prosecutor General's Office, were unprotected, that is, when transmitting information, no encryption cryptographic means of protecting it were used.
Often the information was transmitted in the form of photographs or scanned documents. In addition, the police asked to send responses to their requests via WhatsApp*, Telegram or other instant messengers, which created “conditions for the administration of these software products to access the personal data of citizens, as well as to store it outside the Russian Federation”.
Lawyer Alexei Fedyarov comments on this strange situation in his channel:
“Photos, documents, requests and responses to requests are convenient. This is great in itself, but here are a couple of accents for you.
The first.
In January 2021, this already came to light. It turned out that the Special Purpose Center for Traffic Safety of the Ministry of Internal Affairs collected and transmitted secret information about the movement of motorcades of the first persons of the state over an unsecured connection. Through WhatsApp chats*.
Center staff (two former and one current) told the BBC about it. One, Vasily Vetitnev, even wrote to the Prosecutor General, as the commander of the special battalion Makarenkov instructed the platoon commanders to create groups in WatsApp*.
Ordered to otvatsapitsya platoon.
Ideally, special equipment of domestic production and domestic software should be used for this.
No problems, all for, they just don't exist.
By the way, right now I am conducting a big tax case in which the Federal Tax Service is trying to destroy a domestic IT company - a developer of Russian software with several hundred employees, simply because the guys do not bend in any way. Dare to argue.
The response of the tax official, whom we asked, was excellent: “How is it, after all, Putin says that such companies should be supported?” "Go to Putin", - the official said.
I may not get to Putin, although anything will be possible soon, but I will definitely get to the Presidential Administration, because there is a strong entomological interest.
Second.
The Prosecutor General's Office already writes that Telegram is an unprotected messenger.
I will not continue, I wrote a lot about the mythologization of Durov and his product ... "
Meanwhile, Novye Izvestia has already reported that Durov has seriously increased the privacy of his Telegram messenger so that it can be used without a SIM card. (Although this does not remove the problem of secrecy). In addition, the Russian media have repeatedly reported that the country has allegedly already developed a domestic messenger (and not even one!), To which all officials will allegedly be transferred. The project is called TDM Messenger, and it is positioned as a secure messenger capable of replacing foreign ones.
However, this does not interest the Russians at all. According to the statistics of the Statista portal, none of the domestic messengers is in the top 5 in terms of popularity among the citizens of the country, and only ICQ closed the top 10. As one commentator writes:
- All this only confirms that it is very convenient to use such familiar foreign services, which are free and available, and shows the shortcomings of our own services, for which huge amounts of money are probably allocated, but which are still not in demand.
And another commentator recalls:
- On this occasion, I recalled the case of our intelligence officer (spy?), who, during a search in the USA, was found to have written all the passwords for memory on a piece of paper and pasted it to the monitor. And the second case (I forgot the name of the spy), when “our girl” from the USA called her father on a simple phone and said: “Dad, what should I do? I'm being watched..."
*Owned by Meta, recognized in the Russian Federation as extremist and banned in the territory of the Russian Federation .