Russia Seeds New Surveillance Tech to Squash Ukraine War Dissent

The expanding program — formally known as the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM — was an imperfect means of surveillance. Russia’s telecom providers often incompletely installed and updated the technologies, meaning the system did not always work properly. The volume of data pouring in could be overwhelming and unusable.

At first, the technology was used against political rivals like supporters of Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader. Demand for the tools increased after the invasion of Ukraine, digital rights experts said. Russian authorities turned to local tech companies that built the old surveillance systems and asked for more.

The push benefited companies like Citadel, which had bought many of Russia’s biggest makers of digital wiretapping equipment and controls about 60 to 80 percent of the market for telecommunications monitoring technology, according to the U.S. State Department. The United States announced sanctions against Citadel and its current owner, Anton Cherepennikov, in February.

“Sectors connected to the military and communications are getting a lot of funding right now as they adapt to new demands,” said Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher who studies Russian surveillance companies with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto.

The new technologies give Russia’s security services a granular view of the internet. A tracking system from one Citadel subsidiary, MFI Soft, helps display information about telecom subscribers, along with statistical breakdowns of their internet traffic, on a specialized control panel for use by regional F.S.B. officers, according to one chart.

Another MFI Soft tool, NetBeholder, can map the locations of two phones over the course of the day to discern whether they simultaneously ran into each other, indicating a potential meeting between people.

A different feature, which uses location tracking to check whether several phones are frequently in the same area, deduces whether someone might be using two or more phones. With full access to telecom network subscriber information, NetBeholder’s system can also pinpoint the region in Russia each user is from or what country a foreigner comes from.