Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [73]
The aim of the conference is to work out a strategy for information campaigns on the Internet. It is formulated like this: “To every challenge there should be a response, or better still, two responses simultaneously.”
A source who is familiar with the process of preparations for the meeting explained:
If the opposition launches an Internet publication, the Kremlin should respond by launching two projects.
If a user turns up on LiveJournal talking about protests in Vladivostok, 10 Kremlin spin doctors should access his blog and try to persuade the audience that everything that was written is lies.
Although this campaign concerns internal Russian politics, it demonstrates the IO model that the Kremlin uses across the board, including what happened in Georgia in August 2008 thanks to the influence of Vladislov Surkov. His strategies were captured in the book Chronicles of Information War (Yevropa publishing house, Moscow, 2009), written by two Kremlin spin doctors, Maksim Zharov and Timofey Shevyakov. The following is from the book’s introduction:
Net wars have always been an internal peculiarity of the Internet—and were of no interest to anyone in real life. The five-day war showed that the Net is a front just like the traditional media, and a front that is much faster to respond and much larger in scale. August 2008 was the starting point of the virtual reality of conflicts and the moment of recognition of the need to wage war in the information field too.
Confirmation on the relationship between Nashi and the Kremlin came on April 10, 2009, when Nashi commissar Aleksandr Kuznetsov entered the nation of Georgia en route to Tbilisi to conduct an anti-government rally with 15 or 20 other Nashi members scheduled for April 16. Kuznetsov was arrested at the border, and during his interrogation he produced a letter from the Russian Duma’s Committee on Youth Affairs, requesting Russian officials along the way from Moscow to Tskhinvali to assist the “Moscow-Tskhinvali-Tbilisi Motorcade” in its mission. Nashi founder Vasili Yakemenko currently heads that committee.
In Vladimir Socor’s report of this event for the Eurasia Daily Monitor (April 17, 2009), he writes that Kuznetsov’s statements provide corroboration for earlier reports that Nashi is funded by First Deputy Chief of Presidential Staff Vladislav Surkov.
The Kremlin Spy for Hire Program
Anna Bukovskaya is a Nashi member and St. Petersburg activist who was paid by the Kremlin to spy on opposition political youth movements, according to an article in the Moscow Times (February 6, 2009):
Anna Bukovskaya, a St. Petersburg activist with the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group, said she coordinated a group of 30 young people who infiltrated branches of the banned National Bolshevik Party, Youth Yabloko and United Civil Front in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Voronezh and six other cities.
The agents informed Bukovskaya, who passed the information to senior Nashi official Dmitry Golubyatnikov, who in turn contacted ‘Surkov’s people’ in the Kremlin, Bukovskaya told the Moscow Times. Vladislav Surkov is President Dmitry Medvedev’s first deputy chief of staff.
The agents provided information on planned and past events together with pictures and personal information on activists and leaders, including their contact numbers, Bukovskaya said by telephone from St. Petersburg.
They were paid 20,000 rubles ($550) per month, while she received 40,000 rubles per month, she said.
Bukovskaya provided more details during an interview on Russian Ren TV (February 4, 2009):
[Bukovskaya] The project was to become more aggressive, i.e., videos and photos to compromise the opposition, data from their computers; and, as a separate track, the dispatch of provocateurs.
In other words, computer espionage was part of the services Nashi provided, which isn’t surprising, since Konstantin Goloskov, one of the Russian hackers who acknowledged launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Estonia, was a commissar in Nashi.
In March 2008, Nashi hackers were accused of orchestrating