The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation is the interior ministry of Russia.
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union's KGB; its immediate predecessor was the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) which was reorganized into the FSB in 1995. The three major structural successor components of the former KGB that remain administratively independent of the FSB are the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Protective Service (FSO), and the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President of the Russian Federation (GUSP).
In September 1999, a series of explosions hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1,000, and spreading a wave of fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Invasion of Dagestan, triggered the Second Chechen War. The handling of the crisis by Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency within a few months.
Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev is a Russian politician, security officer and former intelligence officer who served as the secretary of the Security Council of Russia from 2008 to 2024. He previously served as the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) from 1999 to 2008. Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin's inner circle, Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia's national security affairs. He played a key role in the decisions to seize and then annex Crimea in 2014 and to invade Ukraine in 2022.
Andrei Vladimirovich Kozyrev is a Russian politician who served as the former and the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin, in office for the Russian SFSR from October 1990 and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, from 1992 until January 1996 for Russia. In his position, he was credited with developing Russia's foreign policy immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, although many in Russia have criticized him for being weak and not assertive enough in defending Russian interests in the face of NATO in places such as Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ba'athist Iraq.
The System for Operative Investigative Activities is the technical specification for lawful interception interfaces of telecommunications and telephone networks operating in Russia. The current form of the specification enables the targeted surveillance of both telephone and Internet communications. Initially implemented in 1995 to allow access to surveillance data for the FSB, in subsequent years the access has been widened to other law enforcement agencies.
Agentura.Ru is a Russian website that covers subjects related to terrorism and intelligence agencies in Russia. It was created and supported by journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. From 2000 to 2006 the web-site was supported by the ISP Relcom and since 2006 Agentura.Ru has been an independent project.
Andrei Alekseyevich Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist and Russian security services expert. Together with fellow journalist Irina Borogan he is co-founder and editor of the Agentura.Ru website.
Irina Petrovna Borogan, born September 9, 1974, in Moscow, Russia, is a Russian investigative journalist.
Vadim Antonov born May 25, 1965, is a Russian-American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is known for his work on operating systems, Internet backbone networks, network router hardware, computer security, and data warehouses. He is also known for his role in organizing civil resistance to 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt notable for pioneering the use of Internet to effect the political change.
The Committee for State Security was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
Iryna Uladzimirawna Khalip is a Belarusian journalist, reporter and editor in the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta, known for her criticism of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Oleg Vladimirovich Syromolotov was Deputy Director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the Soviet-era KGB. He has headed the DKR, the organisation's counterintelligence branch. He was chief of security for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (2015) is a non-fiction English-language book by Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan which examines the history of surveillance technologies in Russia from the beginnings of the internet to the Internet age.
Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population. Mass surveillance in Russia includes surveillance, open-source intelligence and data mining, lawful interception as well as telecommunications data retention.
The Mikhailov Case refers to an espionage scandal surrounding the activities of the Center of Information Security (CIS) of FSB, whose employees were implicated in high treason after participating in a number of high-profile criminal cases. January 31, 2017 was arrested that the head of the 2nd department of the CIS Sergei Mikhailov (FSB) and his deputy Dmitry Dokuchaev In the same case, the head of the department of investigation of computer incidents of Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov and Georgy Fomchenkov were arrested. The men were convicted of giving information to American private sector researcher Kimberly Zenz, but Zenz herself was never charged, and her requests to testify for the defense were ignored.
Kimberly Zenz is a cybersecurity research with an emphasis on the RuNet. Her work experience includes RuNet researcher at Verisign iDefense and Head of Threat Intelligence at the Deutsche Cyber-Sicherheitsorganisation. In 2019, a Moscow court reportedly accused her of passing along information of interest to the Russian government to U.S. intelligence officials. Zenz refuted these accusations and repeatedly requested to testify. The court ignored her request and did not permit her to testify.
Ruslan Stoyanov is a Russian computer scientist. In December 2016, he was arrested on charges of treason as part of the Mikhailov case. In 2019, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The Traitors (Предатели) is a Russian 2024 documentary mini-series dealing with corruption among high-ranking politicians in the 1990s. The movie was made by Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation with Maria Pevchikh as narrator.
