Paul Goble
Vienna, May 31 – The FSB and quite possibly elements within the Kremlin itself have been encouraging Russian “hacker-patriots” to launch denial of service attacks on websites that official Moscow does not like, according to a leading Russian investigative reporter who specializes on security issues.
In an article in today’s “Novaya gazeta,” Andrei Soldatov draws on a variety of sources -- including information from the Agentura.Ru intelligence portal -- to show the ways in which Russian security services have urged or even guided individual hackers to do what the agencies want (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2007/40/18.html).
Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while achieving the ends that its officials quite publicly indicate they seek.
In 2002, Soldatov notes, Tomsk students launched a denial of service attack at the “Kavkaz-Tsentr” portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials. The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate “expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect.”
Over the next several years, Russian hackers attacked a variety of other sites, often making them inaccessible until their owners or editors shifted to ISPs based not in Russia but abroad. But the next indication of FSB involvement in what officials plausibly described as popular anger came only in the fall of 2005
On October 14 of that year, one day after the clashes in Nalchik, the Russian foreign ministry virtually invited “hacker-patriots” to go on the offensive. “Unfortunately,” the ministry’s site said, “the Swedish authorities up to now have not taken any concrete steps to block the dissemination of the ‘Kavkaz-Tsentr’ site.”
And within 24 hours, Soldatov writes, “the Russian internet-resource mediaactivist.ru launched denial of service actions not only against “Kavkaz-Tsentr” but also against Ekho Moskvy radio, “Novaya gazeta,” and Radio Liberty. Mediaactivist.ru posted electronic addresses hackers could use in each case.
That action, however, quickly fizzled out: The “Karavan” hosting company on which “Kavkaz-Tsentr” had been operating launched its own spam attack on mediaactivist.ru, putting it off the web but only for a brief time. Indeed, that site is now “completely accessible,” Soldatov says.
Most recently, the Moscow journalist continues, Russian “hacker-patriots” launched the attacks on the websites of Estonian government, economic and media resources to protest Tallinn’s decision to move a Soviet war memorial. Estonia then asked and received NATO’s assistance for responding to this new form of aggression.
But Russia’s “hacker-patriots” have not limited themselves to attacks on websites linked to Chechnya or foreign states. They have also attacked extremist groups like the National Bolshevik Party, moderate opposition groups like “the Marc of Those Who Disagree,” and mainstream media outlets like “Kommersant” and “Ekho Moskvy.”
In all these cases, Soldatov suggests, the FSB with its Center for Information Security as well as the National Anti-Terrorist Committee did not have to use their own in-house resources to attack objectionable websites; they could simply point the growing community of “hacker-patriots” in the right direction.
And he concludes his article with the observation that “it is not excluded” that “certain groups of activists are being guided not by the special services but by the administration of the president,” a possibility Soldatov explored recently in another article (http://www.agentura.ru/experts/atarasov/).
He appends two supporting pieces of evidence to his article: First, Soldatov includes an interview with American Internet specialist Evan Coleman who suggests that actions like those launched by Russia’s “hacker-patriots” are at best short-lived and may even be counter-productive.
On the one hand, Coleman points out, the sites subject to denial of service attacks can quickly reopen for business by shifting providers. And on the other, their responses to such attacks forces the sites “to work better and to increase their activity,” not the reverse as those behind these attacks hope.
And second, Soldatov notes that on March 13, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev specifically said that terrorists routinely use the Internet and that Russian agencies must be able to respond by closing their sites down, even if that requires a fundamental change in Russian law.
Less than a month later, the Moscow investigative journalist reports, Nikolai Sintsov, an official representative of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, said that his agency is preparing new legislation, including a proposal that would increase the personal responsibility of ISP operators for the materials sites they host carry.
Soldatov’s article is not definitive. Indeed, in this shadowy world of secret services and private hackers, there is little chance that evidence about links between the two in actions against Internet sites Moscow does not like would ever be beyond the questions of skeptics.
But the Moscow journalist makes a powerful case, one that is in no way undermined by the fact that forces like the “hacker-patriot” community which Russian security agencies are encouraging if not controlling might ultimately threaten precisely those who are currently cheering it on.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Tajik Civil War Refugees to Afghanistan Bring Taliban Ideas to Russia
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 31 – Some of the 200,000 Tajiks who fled to Afghanistan during their own country’s civil war in the 1990s and who were propagandized by Taliban fundamentalists there have now brought the radical ideas of the latter into the Muslim community of the Russian Federation.
Gavkhar Dzhurayeva, the president of the Tajikistan Foundation in Moscow, told a conference on immigration that was held in Yekaterinburg this week that these two-time migrants from her country, first to Afghanistan and then to Russia were “the ideal” carriers of radical, "fundamentalist" Islam (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-05-30/#16585).
“During the civil war in Tajikistan, 200,000 people fled to Afghanistan where they came into contact with a different form of Islam” than they were familiar with, she said. And part of them “accepted [its] ideas and began to disseminate them on the territory of the post-Soviet space.”
Initially, these people returned only to Central Asia, but as economic conditions there continued to lag, many of them migrated to the Russian Federation in hopes of finding work and a better life. Not surprisingly, they carried their newfound version of the faith with them.
At the same conference, imams from mosques in the Urals region of the Russian Federation said that “Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyzes were distinguished by greater religious literacy than that displayed by Tatars and Bashkirs,” something that gave them a real advantage in religious disputes.
According to Farukh Mirzoyev, president of the Yekaterinburg-based Somon Center of Tajik Culture, immigrants from Central Asia now form “a notable part” of those who attend mosques in the region, with many of them now working as imams or even as instructors in the maktabs, the local Islamic schools.
Given that many of them follow a version of Islam close to that of the Afghan Taliban, these immigrants have attracted the attention of the security agencies of the Russian Federation and those of the Central Asian countries, in particular the intelligence service of Uzbekistan.
Indeed, as recently as April of this year, Russian officials at the request of Tashkent arrested and deported an Uzbek living in Sverdlovsk oblast who the Uzbekistan authorities said was guilty of attempting to undermine the constitutional order of that Central Asian state.
Vienna, May 31 – Some of the 200,000 Tajiks who fled to Afghanistan during their own country’s civil war in the 1990s and who were propagandized by Taliban fundamentalists there have now brought the radical ideas of the latter into the Muslim community of the Russian Federation.
Gavkhar Dzhurayeva, the president of the Tajikistan Foundation in Moscow, told a conference on immigration that was held in Yekaterinburg this week that these two-time migrants from her country, first to Afghanistan and then to Russia were “the ideal” carriers of radical, "fundamentalist" Islam (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-05-30/#16585).
“During the civil war in Tajikistan, 200,000 people fled to Afghanistan where they came into contact with a different form of Islam” than they were familiar with, she said. And part of them “accepted [its] ideas and began to disseminate them on the territory of the post-Soviet space.”
Initially, these people returned only to Central Asia, but as economic conditions there continued to lag, many of them migrated to the Russian Federation in hopes of finding work and a better life. Not surprisingly, they carried their newfound version of the faith with them.
At the same conference, imams from mosques in the Urals region of the Russian Federation said that “Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyzes were distinguished by greater religious literacy than that displayed by Tatars and Bashkirs,” something that gave them a real advantage in religious disputes.
According to Farukh Mirzoyev, president of the Yekaterinburg-based Somon Center of Tajik Culture, immigrants from Central Asia now form “a notable part” of those who attend mosques in the region, with many of them now working as imams or even as instructors in the maktabs, the local Islamic schools.
Given that many of them follow a version of Islam close to that of the Afghan Taliban, these immigrants have attracted the attention of the security agencies of the Russian Federation and those of the Central Asian countries, in particular the intelligence service of Uzbekistan.
Indeed, as recently as April of this year, Russian officials at the request of Tashkent arrested and deported an Uzbek living in Sverdlovsk oblast who the Uzbekistan authorities said was guilty of attempting to undermine the constitutional order of that Central Asian state.
Window on Eurasia: Moscow Uses Category of ‘Ethnic Muslim’ in Allocating Haj Slots
Paul Goble
Vienna, May 31 – The mixed government-religious Russian Haj Commission has decided to allocate places for next year’s pilgrimage to Mecca not on the basis of the number of faithful but rather in terms of the number of “ethnic Muslims,” people who are members of historically Islamic nationalities.
This decision, which appears intended to reduce pressure on Russia’s overall haj allocation – set by the Saudi authorities at 20,500 for next year – will also have the effect of rewarding more moderate Muslims of European Russia and the Middle Volga at the expense of more radical ones in the North Caucasus (http://muslim-press.ru, May 31).
According to an article in the Muslim newspaper “Assalam” cited by the Islamic news portal, the Russian Haj Commission has decided to allocate 6800 slots to the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) and 7600 to the MSD for the European Part of Russia even though these last year sent on the haj only 320 and 2200 respectively.
At the same time, the commission has allocated only 5300 places for the entire North Caucasus, far less than the 15,000 who made the haj last year from Daghestan alone and vastly fewer than the total number for that entire region, including some 5,000 from Chechnya and at least that many from other republics there.
In addition to rewarding the first group and restricting the second, the Haj Commission’s unprecedented decision also may have the effect of excluding from the haj members of other ethnic groups – in particular, ethnic Russians – who have converted to Islam but whose nationalities are not known to be “ethnic Muslim.”
There are likely to be three major consequences from this decision, none of which can be entirely welcome to the civil authorities in Moscow who want to maintain control over this process or even to the leaders of some MSDs who will view this as an insult to Islam as such.
First, the haj commission’s equation of “ethnic Muslim” with believer may simply its administrative problems – after making this allocation on the basis of the census, the commission can simply stand aside – but it is certain to lead some members of historically Islamic nations to become more interested in their faith.
Second, this equation of ethnic and religious by a quasi-government group will likely cause ever more non-Muslims and Russian nationalists in particular to conclude that anyone with a Muslim name is a believer and even a likely extremist, judgments that will only further exacerbate inter-religious and inter-ethnic tensions.
And third, as has happened in earlier years, many Muslims in the North Caucasus will simply ignore this allocation and make the haj on their own, something that will simultaneously reduce Moscow’s control over the process and radicalize those believers who will see the Russian authorities yet again trying to restrict the influence of Islam.
Vienna, May 31 – The mixed government-religious Russian Haj Commission has decided to allocate places for next year’s pilgrimage to Mecca not on the basis of the number of faithful but rather in terms of the number of “ethnic Muslims,” people who are members of historically Islamic nationalities.
This decision, which appears intended to reduce pressure on Russia’s overall haj allocation – set by the Saudi authorities at 20,500 for next year – will also have the effect of rewarding more moderate Muslims of European Russia and the Middle Volga at the expense of more radical ones in the North Caucasus (http://muslim-press.ru, May 31).
According to an article in the Muslim newspaper “Assalam” cited by the Islamic news portal, the Russian Haj Commission has decided to allocate 6800 slots to the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) and 7600 to the MSD for the European Part of Russia even though these last year sent on the haj only 320 and 2200 respectively.
At the same time, the commission has allocated only 5300 places for the entire North Caucasus, far less than the 15,000 who made the haj last year from Daghestan alone and vastly fewer than the total number for that entire region, including some 5,000 from Chechnya and at least that many from other republics there.
In addition to rewarding the first group and restricting the second, the Haj Commission’s unprecedented decision also may have the effect of excluding from the haj members of other ethnic groups – in particular, ethnic Russians – who have converted to Islam but whose nationalities are not known to be “ethnic Muslim.”
There are likely to be three major consequences from this decision, none of which can be entirely welcome to the civil authorities in Moscow who want to maintain control over this process or even to the leaders of some MSDs who will view this as an insult to Islam as such.
First, the haj commission’s equation of “ethnic Muslim” with believer may simply its administrative problems – after making this allocation on the basis of the census, the commission can simply stand aside – but it is certain to lead some members of historically Islamic nations to become more interested in their faith.
Second, this equation of ethnic and religious by a quasi-government group will likely cause ever more non-Muslims and Russian nationalists in particular to conclude that anyone with a Muslim name is a believer and even a likely extremist, judgments that will only further exacerbate inter-religious and inter-ethnic tensions.
And third, as has happened in earlier years, many Muslims in the North Caucasus will simply ignore this allocation and make the haj on their own, something that will simultaneously reduce Moscow’s control over the process and radicalize those believers who will see the Russian authorities yet again trying to restrict the influence of Islam.
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