On June 21, 2021, Edward Snowden celebrated his 38th birthday in Russia. Hes been in the country for over eight years, having been granted permanent residence in the country in October 2020 [1]. Snowden, an American, has not returned to his native country since leaking millions of classified documents detailing the massive surveillance programs that the United States undertook.

While many have heard Edward Snowdens name, the programs that he uncovered have seemingly faded in the public consciousness in recent years. Snowdens reveal of massive global surveillance programs in 2013 was a wake-up call for many Americans, when modern technology and digital communication were truly becoming everyday tools at work and home. His leaked documents highlighted how so many Internet activities are never truly private.

Snowdens Career Beginnings and Disillusionment

Snowden began his career by joining the Army in May 2004, but was discharged four months later due to broken legs he suffered in a training accident [2]. Following his short time in the Armed Forces, he gained a position as a security specialist at an NSA-contracted facility, beginning his time in the intelligence community. He then joined the CIA in 2006 until 2009, years that disillusioned his faith in Americas intelligence community [3]. He described an incident where the CIA purposefully intoxicated a Swiss banker and encouraged him to drive home. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA offered him help in exchange for becoming an informant.

Following his resignation from the CIA, Snowden worked as an NSA contractor in Japan with high-level security clearance for three years before moving to Hawaii to join Booz Allen Hamilton, another private contractor. He joined Booz Allen Hamilton with the sole intent of gaining clearance to new classified files. After just a few weeks on the job, Snowden gained access to the classified material, downloaded it on a flash drive, and fled the United States shortly afterward. Finally, he distributed the materials to media outlets he trusted, particularly The Guardian, with the first revelations posted publicly in June 2013.

What Programs Did Snowden Reveal?

The biggest revelation in Snowdens leaked documents was the existence of a National Security Agency program called PRISM. Under the program, the NSA had direct access to the servers of the biggest tech companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook without their knowledge [4]. Using this direct access, the NSA could collect users emails, search history, and file transfers without a court order. Even if you were an American citizen, you could have been subject to this surveillance if your messages ever touched a non-American server.

Snowden explained the horrifying simplicity of the NSAs programs, stating I, sitting at my desk, [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email [5]. This allegation was initially denied by government officials, yet leaked documents showed a program called XKeystore allowed analysts to search enormous databases with just one piece of identifying information [5].

In addition, Snowden revealed NSA phone-tapping of allied leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [6]. These revelations caused an uproar among American allies, particularly in Europe. The NSA also monitored various charity organizations and businesses including UNICEF, the United Nations agency dedicated to providing aid to children worldwide and Petrobras, Brazils largest oil company.

The Legal Justification

All of these programs were justified by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, a bill signed in 2008 that amended the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The 2008 amendment rid FISA of its warrant requirement, allowing the NSA to spy on any foreign communications without a court order. In practice, this meant any communications that touched a foreign server were legally allowed to be collected.

Snowden explained Even if you sent [a message] to someone within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go to New York to London and back and get caught up in the database [7]. Because the data had reached a foreign server, no matter how short of a time, the NSA was able to collect, store and potentially analyze that data through Section 702s legal framework.

The Effects

A Washington Post investigation found that approximately 90% of account holders in a leaked data cache were ordinary Internet users, with just a tenth of the account holders being NSA targets [8]. These account holders were subject to daily tracking, with NSA analysts having access to intimate conversations unrelated to national security. Put simply, the NSA had access to millions of Americans personal data, able to be perused by low-level analysts with little more than an email address.

In addition, government officials responses to Snowdens leaks were swift and severe. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Snowdens leaks told terrorists what they can now do to (avoid) detection [9]. Various other officials agreed with Kerrys assessment, stating that suspected terrorists had begun changing their communication tactics following Snowdens revelations [10]. While the NSA claimed that digital surveillance helped prevent over 50 potential terrorist events, then-President Obama stated that other methods could have prevented those attacks [11].

Data Privacy vs. Protection

Above all, the NSA has been criticized for conducting digital surveillance beyond the scope of national security. While government officials have stated that the surveillance saved countless lives by preventing terrorist attacks, claims that these programs solely stopped potential terror attacks are dubious. The inappropriate collection of everyday Americans data, however, is undeniable. Millions of Americans emails, video calls and search histories were readily available to low-level NSA analysts. While Edward Snowden remains a highly controversial figure today, his revelations of mass global surveillance undoubtedly increased Americans concern for data privacy. And while some still view Snowden as a criminal or traitor, some see him as a brave whistleblower who revealed just how exposed our data, and our lives, can be.

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The Fallout of Edward Snowden and his Leaked Documents ...

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

When hearing the term whistleblower, some of the names that may automatically come to mind include famous whistleblowers that have been covered in the news: Edward Snowden, the controversial whistleblower who leaked documents regarding National Security Agency surveillance programs; to Deep Throat of Watergate, the FBI whistleblower who would later be named as Mark Felt; and even Frances Haugen, the recent Facebook whistleblower.

These whistleblower cases may have been highly publicized across news stations, but they are some of the many whistleblowers across a number ofdifferent industrieswho help uncover fraud and corruption and in turn, help make America a more equitable place.

Awhistlebloweris a private individual who comes forward with evidence regarding fraud, corruption, waste, or abuse and reports it to law enforcement or the appropriate government agency. Whistleblowers help expose illegal or unethical behavior by providing inside information that otherwise would not have become known to the public.

Whistleblowers are also known as qui tam relators and are usually employees, former employees, contractors, freelancers, or other individuals with non-public information regarding crimes, unethical behavior, corruption, or fraud against the government. Common examples of whistleblowers include a healthcare worker that witnesses medical billing fraud or a defense contractor employee noticing inferior products being substituted and sold to the U.S. government.

Whistleblowers are incentivized to come forward with the potential of receiving a financial reward by various state and federal laws which also serve to provide whistleblowers with protection against retaliation.

Abraham Lincoln passed the False Claims Act (FCA) in 1863 as a way to encourage citizens to report the fraud and waste that was taking place during the Civil War. The FCA, also known as Lincolns Law, contains a qui tam provision that allows private citizens to bring forth lawsuits on behalf of the government against entities who have committed fraud and share in the financial recovery if the case is successful. According to theDepartment of Justice, the government recovered more than $70 billion in FCA lawsuits between 1986 and 2021.

Whistleblowers throughout history have helped to exposehealthcare fraud, environmental regulation violations, government contract fraud, violations of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act,tax fraud, and more. These types of illegal and unethical activities can harm taxpayers that fund government programs as well as the general public, and these crimes may otherwise go unknown without the bravery of whistleblowers.

Whistleblower lawsuits that are filed under the FCA usually involve healthcare fraud andgovernment contractor fraud. Other types of whistleblower lawsuits involvesecurities fraud,customs/tariffs fraud, tax fraud, and environmental crimes.

Some of the most common whistleblower claims include:

Submitting false claims and information to procure unwarranted government funds, grants, loans, and contracts

Violating the terms of a government contract by providing substandard goods or services

Gross waste of funds, including using grant money or PPP loans for personal gain

Healthcare billing fraud, including billing for services not provided, double billing, upcoding, and more

Offering bribes or providing kickbacks in exchange for government-funded business

Presenting a danger to public health or safety, including designing and/or failing to recall dangerous automobiles and parts

The majority of whistleblowers are not splashed across the news like Ed Snowden. In fact, most remain anonymous, which helps protect them from retaliation.

The U.S. has many laws on the federal and state levels that are meant to protect both private and public sector employees from employer retaliation for becoming a whistleblower. The FCA protects whistleblowers who report fraud against the government from retaliation, while federal employees who report corruption or misconduct are protected from retaliation by theWhistleblower Protection Act. Other whistleblower laws that afford protections include but are not limited to theSarbanes-Oxley Act, theOccupational Health and Safety Act, theClean Air Act, and theToxic Substances Control Act.

Types of employer retaliation prohibited by whistleblower protection laws include termination, suspension, demotion, threats, harassment, withholding pay or benefits, or any other discrimination directed at an employee or contractor for their actions as a whistleblower. Whistleblowers who are retaliated against have the right to bring a separate lawsuit against their employer for damages relating to the retaliation, including reinstatement, back pay, attorneys fees, and more.

While the whistleblower does not specifically have to witness the fraud or crime take place, it is vital in all qui tam lawsuits that the whistleblower has thorough and specific evidence that proves the fraudulent or illegal behavior took place. Ideally, the evidence the whistleblower gathers should answer the following questions:

Who is committing fraud or a crime, and who knows about it?

What fraud, crime, or violation took place?

When and where did the fraud or illegal behavior occur?

How was the crime or fraud committed, and is it ongoing?

How was the public affected by what took place?

Under the FCA as well as other whistleblower programs including the IRS, SEC, CFTC, and NHTSA, whistleblowers who provide information that leads to the government successfully settling the matter are rewarded between 15 and 30 percent of the recovery. In a multi-million dollar qui tam settlement, thewhistleblowers financial rewardcan be significant.

Link:
What is a Whistleblower? - The National Law Review

States spy on each other. This fact is neither shocking nor surprising in itself. There are plenty of good reasons why states do it, even if not all states are equal in their relative intelligence power. So, you would think by now that we would have a high bar for being surprised or shocked by revelations about states spying on each other.

Certainly, when states become victims of espionage their responses are shaped by a number of factors, including the strategic context (is the transgressor an adversary or an ally?) and the severity of the case (a one-off or a sustained campaign?). Domestic public opinion might be inflamed by revelations of espionage victimhood, or else barely flicker with quickly-fading attention. Throughout, victim states will recognize that the basic problemthat they are targets of foreign espionage operationsis the mirror image of their own pursuit of intelligence gain against other states. States are not, therefore, shocked or surprised by the existence of foreign espionage: they do their best to counter it and remediate and respond to it where they have to. As indicated by recent comments from FBI director Christopher Wray about the magnitude of the threat posed by Chinese espionage, recognizing the perennial nature of espionage doesnt necessarily imply complacency towards it.

The high bar to surprise or shock holds good even in the case of newer forms of espionage, such as digital or cyber spyingthat is, establishing access to digital data for intelligence gain, whether that data is stored at rest somewhere (on a device like a mobile phone or laptop), or else by intercepting data whilst it is traversing a network. Nearly a decade after Edward Snowdens revelations, few people can be surprised that some states have not only the ambition but also the capabilities to derive significant intelligence gains from information and communications technology.

Another obvious point is that, given much of this global technological infrastructure is built, owned, and operated by the private sector, the practice of states spying on each other inevitably involves relationshipscommercial, collaborative, or competitivebetween governments and companies. These relationships might be transactionalthe procurement by governments of a service or toolor they might be framed by legal requirement, compelling companies to comply with lawful requests for access. Equally, they might involve the non-consensual acquisition of data from companies by government intelligence agencies, or indeed the recognition that these companies are useful vectors of attack, so-called supply chain attacks such as the SolarWinds case.

The private sectors importance also extends to digital spying by the state on its own citizens: sovereign capabilities for domestic surveillance are more likely to be developed by the private sector than the state itself. States with a thriving tech sector undoubtedly have had an advantage in this respect, with a domestic network of trusted companies to develop surveillance tools and systems. But, over decades, the market for commercial spyware has become truly global.

At its best, this global market helps to fill an important gapproviding those states that would otherwise lack the technical capabilities with the ability to counter severe national security threats such as terrorism or serious crime. But at its worst, the capabilities procured from the global marketplace can enable repressive states to target dissidents, either passively or to enable operations against them.

Many companies are active in this marketplace, but one, in particular, has become a focal point for global criticism of commercial spyware: the Israeli company NSO Group and particularly its Pegasus spyware. Pegasus is reportedly so good at what it doesfor example, providing zero-click access to a targeted iPhone, meaning no need for targets to fall for malware-laden messagesthat many states were lining up to procure its services. This customer interest was great for the companyand presumably also for the Israeli government. The government issued export licenses for the spyware and potentially was able to integrate this commercial success into its wider diplomatic strategyessentially, what many states would do in a similar position.

The problem facing the companywhether it was recognized as such or notwas how to contain the potentially negative consequences of this burgeoning customer interest. New contracts were one thing, but would its values, future sales, and potentially its continued existence as a company be compromised if its new customers used Pegasus to spy on innocent subjects, to enable victimization and human rights abuses? To this questionwe can add one other, perhaps more strategically pertinent for the Israeli government, and potentially devastating in repercussions for businesses like NSO Group: what if Pegasus was used, not against a clients domestic targets, but against foreign governments, including governments with which Israel has close diplomatic ties?

This is indeed what recent reporting suggests has happened, with revelations in December 2021 that Pegasus had been used to target U.S. diplomats working overseas, and in more recent reporting that a range of European officials, including someone from the UK government working in the prime ministers office (10 Downing Street), had also been targeted. In the UK case, independent researchers suspected the state client using Pegasus to target the UK was the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In diplomatic terms, the UAE is a relatively close regional partner of the UKone with a controversial and widely-reported broader strategy of harnessing commercial spyware services to enhance its national intelligence power.

The same reports that highlighted the reported breach of communications in 10 Downing Street also indicated that Pegasus customers had also successfully used it in 2020 and 2021 against UK diplomatswith the UAE, India, and Cyprus identified as the potential state actors. All these states are regarded as partnersindeed, just this month the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, signed agreements with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, including an agreement to improve cybersecurity cooperation.

This juxtaposition suggests that states take a broad view of such revelations, placing them in broader strategic context. This is similar in the U.S. case, where bilateral relations with Pegasus-customer states appear relatively unharmed. In contrast, the United States has pursued more targeted responses against NSO Group and other firms, and might go further to address foreign commercial spyware more generally.

Collectively, this might suggest that we are at some kind of transitional point in the relationship between states and commercial spyware. A global market that has developed quickly and in the shadows is now very much more salient and starting to provoke some pushback from states. And yet, whilst the fates of a single company like NSO Group can rise and fall, it is very difficult to see the wider industry enjoying anything other than continued success.

States are not going to stop wanting to spy on each other, or on other, non-state targets. The market that has grown to cater to this perennial state practice is too valuable, too globally dispersed, and likely also too covert to be readily amenable to collective, verifiable efforts to curb it. And, in the absence of effective constraints, commercial spyware will continue to level the playing field between state actors in the competition for intelligence gains. This will create both opportunities to be exploited and challenges that must be overcomean ever-present feature of intelligence competition between states throughout history.

Joe Devanny is a Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. He writes here in a personal capacity. He can be contacted on Twitter @josephdevanny.

Image: Reuters.

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Pegasus in Downing Street? Commercial Spyware and Espionage Competition - The National Interest Online

Following an extradition order issued yesterday by a British court, Julian Assangefounder of WikiLeaks and willing agent of Russian active measuresis one step closer to facing American justice.

Assange is just the latest Donald Trump satellite to face criminal charges, after Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and others. The question cannot be avoided: What about the ringleader himself? It must be counted an irony of history that a sizable fraction of dyed-in-the-wool leftists, assisted by a few preposterous libertarians, who labored to turn Assangeand later Edward Snowdeninto folk heroes during the Obama administration found themselves cheering Trump and lauding his socialist principles. It is fitting and proper that Assange answer for his crimes, but Trump presents a larger political problem that mere criminal justice cannot solve.

The Trump-Assange fringe has found its primary cause in the rejection of American empire and has been sympathetic to Americas enemies around the world. Bizarrely for a movement proclaiming fidelity to transparent government, it has greeted with enthusiasm and even active support Vladimir Putins hostility to free government, sabotage of democracy in the West, subversion of democracy in (and war on) Ukraine, and extinguishing of democracy in Russia. (Little wonder that ever since Snowden quit his country with his ill-gotten goods, he has enjoyed a welcome refuge in Putins Russia.)

Anti-communist crusaders like Richard Nixon used to accuse their political opponents of being pinki.e., half red, or sympathetic to communism. It is remarkable that one of the most consequential allies of the anti-American reactionary left leads the American right. Before Trumps ascendancy, the Republican party championed American global leadership. Now its an illiberal cult espousing the narrow nationalist themes of America First. Trumps political movement remains committed to the ruination of Americas institutions and the retreat of its global influence. Under his sway, the Republican party views Joe Biden as a greater threat to the country than Putins Russia. Far from believing, as Republican presidents used to believe, that America was and ought to be a beacon of democracy in the world, Trumps Republicans are intent on destroying democracy at home while admiring foreign scourges like Viktor Orbn.

The alliance between the reactionary left and the unhinged right has sought to corrupt the American republic and inhibit its power in the world. It should come as no surprise that the greatest opponents of American activism on the world stage are also the most corrosive to its internal politics: At its noblest, Americas foreign policy is based, however imperfectly, on the principles of freedom and democracy. Although not guided entirely by altruistic considerations, U.S. foreign policy is beyond comparison with the paranoid, vicious realpolitik that characterizes Russian or Chinese behavior in the world. It is the distinctly American internationalism, blending realism with idealismcoercion against despots and a basic concern for human rightsthat leaves the new left and the old right out of sorts.

Both Assange and Trumpthe two were practically teammates in 2016are unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest and lack any moral constraints in the pursuit of their overriding objectivesthe end of American hegemony and personal enrichment at the expense of the country, respectively. Assange faces charges as a dangerous foreign agent for attacking the republic from without as Trump subverted it from within.

Assange evidently aspires to live in a world without authority and in which no country (save, one imagines, his Russian benefactors) can act to protect its interests. The proper response to foreign agents who filch official secrets and interfere with elections is to arraign them for judgment before a court of law.

Trump, too, evidently aspires to live in a world without any authority but his own, or those of his role models: Putin, Xi, Kim, and his favorite dictator, Sisi. In this sense, Trumps first impeachmentover withholding foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for personal political favorsrevealed the same deep-seated contempt for democracy that was on display in his second impeachment. The proper response to such anti-democratic politicians is for responsible parties and citizens to pass them over.

The cause of democracy and the rule of law will soon be offered two opportunities, one legal and the other political. In short order, Assange will find himself in an American courtroom, answering for his outrages. And voters will have another opportunity to reject Trumpor whoever is elevated by the anti-democratic faction ascendant on the rightat the voting booth.

In the realm of law and of politics, legitimate power finds itself under several forms of overt and covert attack. Its partisans dare not squander the opportunity to offer it a vigorous defense.

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Assange and Trump, Partners - The Bulwark

Russia isknown for itsarmy of hackers, but sincethe start of itsinvasion of Ukraine, dozens of Russian organizations including government agencies, oil and gas companies, and financial institutions have been hacked,with terabytes of stolen data leaked onto the internet.

Distributed Denial of Secrets, the transparency collective thats best known for its 2020release of 270gigabytes of U.S. law enforcement data (in the midst of racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd),has become the de facto home of the hacked datasets from Russia.The datasets are submitted to DDoSecretsmostly by anonymous hackers, and those datasets are then made available to the public on the collectives website and distributed using BitTorrent. (I am an adviser to DDoSecrets).

The flood of Russian data has meant a lot of sleepless nights, and its truly overwhelming, Emma Best, co-founder of DDoSecrets, told The Interceptvia an encrypted messaging app. In its first 10 years, WikiLeaks claimed to publish 10 million documents. In the less than two months since the invasion began, weve published over 6 million Russian documents and it absolutely feels like it.

After receiving a dataset, DDoSecrets organizes and compresses the data; it then starts distributingthe data using BitTorrent for public consumption, publicizes it, and helps journalists at a wide range of newsrooms access and report on it. DDoSecrets has published about 30 hacked datasets from Russia sinceits invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

The vast majority of sources who provided the hacked Russian data appear to be anonymous individuals, many self-identifying as part of the Anonymous hacktivist movement. Some sources provide email addresses or other contact information as part of the dumped data, and some, like Network Battalion 65, have their own social media presence.

Still, with so many datasets submitted by anonymous hackers, its impossible to be certain about their motives or if theyre even truly hacktivists. For instance, in 2016 hackers compromised the network of the Democratic National Committee and leaked stolen emails to WikiLeaks in an attempt to hurt Hillary Clintons presidential campaign. Guccifer 2.0, the hacker persona responsible, claimed to be a loneactor but was later revealed to be an invention of the GRU, Russias military intelligence agency.

For this reason, the recent Russian datasets published by DDoSecrets includea disclaimer: This dataset was released in the buildup to, in the midst of, or in the aftermath of a cyberwar or hybrid war. Therefore, there is an increased chance of malware, ulterior motives and altered or implanted data, or false flags/fake personas. As a result, we encourage readers, researchers and journalists to take additional care with the data.

On February 26, two days after Russias invasion started, DDoSecrets published 200 gigabytes of emails from the Belarus weapons manufacturer Tetraedr, submitted by the hacktivist persona Anonymous Liberland and the Pwn-Br Hack Team. Belarus is a close ally to Russia in its war against Ukraine. A message published with the dataset announced #OpCyberBullyPutin.

OnFebruary 25, the notorious Russian ransomware gang known as Conti publicly expressed its support for Russias war, and two days later, onFebruary 27, an anonymous Ukrainian security researcher who had hacked Contis internal infrastructure leaked two years of Conti chat logs,along withtraining documentation, hacking tools, and source code from the criminal hackers. I cannot shoot anything, but I can fight with a keyboard and mouse, the anonymous researcher told CNN on March 30 before he safely slipped out of Ukraine.

In early March, DDoSecrets published 817 gigabytes of hacked data from Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency responsible for monitoring, controlling, and censoring Russian mass media. This data specifically came from the regional branch of the agency in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Intercept made this dataset searchable and shared access with independent Russian journalists from Meduza who reported that Roskomnadzor had been monitoring the internet for antimilitarism since at least 2020. In early March, Roskomnadzor began censoring access to Meduza from inside Russia due to systematic spread of fakes about the special operation in Ukraine, a spokesperson for the agency told the Russian news site RIA Novosti.

Thehacks continued. In mid-March, DDoSecrets published 79 gigabytes of emails from the Omega Co., the research and development wing of the worlds largest oil pipeline company, Transneft, which is state-controlled in Russia.In the second half of March, hacktivism against Russia began to heat up. DDoSecrets published an additional five datasets:

On the last day of March, the transparency collective also published 51.9 gigabytes of emails from the Marathon Group, an investment firm owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Alexander Vinokurov.

On the first day of April, DDoSecrets published 15 gigabytes of emails from the charity wing of the Russian Orthodox Church. Because the emails might include sensitive and privateinformation from individuals, DDoSecrets isnt distributing thisdatato the public. Instead, journalists and researchers can contact DDoSecrets to request a copy of it.

On April 3, DDoSecrets published 483 gigabytes of emails and documents from Mosekspertiza, a state-owned corporation that provides expert services to the business community in Russia.On April 4, DDoSecrets published 786 gigabytes of documents and emails from the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Co., referred to with the English acronym VGTRK. VGTRK is Russias state-owned broadcaster; itoperates dozens of television and radio stations across Russia, including regional, national, and international stations in several languages. Former employees of VGTRK told thedigital publication Colta.ru that the Kremlin frequently dictated how the news should be covered.Network Battalion 65 is the source for both the VGTRK and Mosekspertiza hacks.

Russias legal sector also got hacked. On April 8, DDoSecrets published 65 gigabytes of emails from the law firm Capital Legal Services. The persona wh1t3sh4d0wsubmitted the data to the transparency collective.

In the following days, DDoSecrets published three more datasets:

By April 11, DDoSecrets had published another three datasets:

In mid-April, DDoSecrets published several datasets from the oil and gas industries:

On April 16, DDoSecrets published two more datasets:

Just during the last week, DDoSecrets published these datasets:

Earlier today, DDoSecrets published 342 gigabytes of emails from Enerpred, the largest producer of hydraulic tools in Russia that works in the energy, petrochemical, coal, gas and construction industries.

Despite the massive scale of these Russian data leaks, very few journalists have reported on them so far. Since the war began, Russia has severely clamped down onits domestic media, introducing penalties of years in prison for journalistswho use the wrong words when describingthe war in Ukraine like calling it a war instead of a special military operation. Russia has also ramped up its censorship efforts, blocking Twitter and Facebook and censoring access to international news sites, leaving the Russian public largely in the dark when it comes to views that arent sanctioned by the state.

One of the barriers for non-Russian news organizations is language: The hacked data is principally in Russian. Additionally, hacked datasets always come with considerable technical challenges. The Intercept, which was founded in part to report on the archive of National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, has been using our technical resources to build out tools to make these Russian datasets searchable and then sharing access to these tools with other journalists. Russian-speaking journalists from Meduza which is forced to operate in Latvia to avoid the Kremlins reach have already published a story based on one of the datasets indexed by The Intercept.

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Russia Is Losing a War Against Hackers Stealing Huge Amounts of Data - The Intercept