Month: April 2017

Three polls Saturday showed a rise in support for the opposition Labour Party, although the governing Conservative Party maintained a commanding lead.

The polls showed the party of British Prime Minister Theresa May remained between 11 and 17 points ahead of Labour, still enough to deliver a clear victory as she seeks a mandate ahead of negotiations over Brexit, set to begin in the summer.

However, the polls showed the gap had closed from leads of up to 25 points reported last weekend.

Labour-Conservative gap

One poll by YouGov showed the Conservative lead over the Labour had fallen to 13 points, compared to the 23 points that the same polling firm found last week.

The YouGov poll for the Sunday Times found that 44 percent were set to back the Conservatives, down from 48 percent last weekend. Support for Labour climbed to 31 percent from 25 percent.

May said April 11 that she would look to hold an election June 8, to secure a mandate for her plan for leaving the European Union.

A further tightening in poll ratings might generate more uncertainty over what Britain’s position will be when it sits down in June to begin negotiations in earnest.

Is Conservative support falling?

However, despite the narrowing gap, pollsters were divided over whether support for the Conservatives was actually falling.

An earlier poll by Opinium showed support for the Conservatives had risen 2 percentage points, but the gap between the biggest parties narrowed nevertheless as Labour boosted their support by 4 percentage points. Smaller parties saw their share of the vote drop.

The smallest gap between the parties was 11 points in a poll by ORB for the Sunday Telegraph. It showed support for the Conservatives at 42 percent, while support for Labour was 31 percent. It was ORB’s first poll on the election since May called the poll last week, and is not necessarily comparable with polls by other firms.
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Agents from the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service showed up in Moscow in May 2009 with a specific mission: to nab one of the world’s most notorious hackers. But to do that, the Americans needed Russia’s help.

They turned to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the country’s main intelligence agency, and shared operational information with officers from its computer-crimes unit, the Center for Information Security.

The hacker, Roman Seleznyov, shut down his operations a month later in a move prompted, the U.S. believes, by a leak from the FSB. The credit-card fraudster, it turns out, had bragged in conversations intercepted a year earlier about his protection from the computer-crimes unit.

US court

The incident, detailed in the legal filings that resulted in a U.S. federal court recently sentencing Seleznyov to 27 years in prison, exposes an unintended consequence of Washington’s cybercrime cooperation with Russia: the United States finds itself indicting some of the top-level Russian security officials it worked with. 

At least one of those officials is a former hacker who worked with the FSB — an agency accused of involvement in the hacking of U.S. political parties’ computers in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that one of those very FSB officers has himself been charged in Russia with high treason.

In short, the Russians were recruiting hackers while the Americans sought to work with the FSB to thwart cybercriminals. Now the Americans are indicting — and in Seleznyov’s case, sentencing — hackers tied in some way to the FSB. The Russians, meanwhile, are charging some of those same individuals with treason.

“Russia sees those who cooperated as traitors,” explained Pavel Vrublevsky, a prominent e-payment entrepreneur who was imprisoned in Russia for ordering a cyberattack against a competitor. “Now America sees the very same people as cybercriminals themselves.”

Seleznyov is not the first Russian to have been caught up in a widening U.S. dragnet that has snagged cybercriminals from around the world. Others include Aleksandr Panin, convicted in a federal court in Atlanta in 2016 for creating a computer program that infected millions of computers and drained bank accounts in multiple countries.

WATCH: Czech Police Arrest Yevgeny Nikulin In Prague

There’s also Yevgeny Nikulin, who has sat in a Czech jail following his October arrest while Moscow and Washington both fight for his extradition. And the same day that Seleznyov was sentenced, U.S. prosecutors announced the indictment of another Russian, Pyotr Levashov, arrested in Spain, accusing him of masterminding a “bot net” of infected computers to steal money from bank accounts.

Seleznyov, the son of a Russian lawmaker, raked in $170 million selling stolen credit-card information online beginning in 2007, according to U.S. officials. By 2009, his operation was one of the largest providers of such stolen data in the world.

The determination that Seleznyov was behind the scheme was what led U.S. investigators to seek the FSB’s help in 2009, according to material submitted by prosecutors in a U.S. federal court.

In Moscow, they met with officials from the agency’s Center for Information Security, including deputy chief Sergei Mikhailov and his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchayev, current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the case told RFE/RL.

 

 

Unfortunately for the Americans, news of the meetings apparently leaked. Seleznyov shut down his so-called carding operations a month later.

As U.S. prosecutors noted in court documents, Seleznyov had been recorded telling a colleague in 2008 that he had “obtained protection through the law-enforcement contacts in the computer-crimes squad of the FSB.”

Seleznyov eventually resurfaced using a different alias, but was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2011 and arrested by U.S. agents while vacationing in the Maldives in 2014. A federal jury convicted him on 38 counts in 2016, and he was sentenced on April 21 to 27 years in prison.

“Never before has a criminal engaged in computer fraud of this magnitude been identified, captured, and convicted by an American jury,” prosecutors wrote in their court filings.

In from the cold

The 2009 Moscow discussion was just one of many between U.S. and Russian officials as they sought to work together in investigating international computer crimes. 

The effort was largely ad hoc, and U.S. officials sought over the following years to a build a more formal arrangement, according to David Hickton, a former U.S. prosecutor involved in several high-profile criminal investigations of alleged Russian hackers. 

They include the 2014 indictment of Yevgeny Bogachev, who is accused by the FBI of helping to build a network of infected computers around the world using software known as GameOver ZeuS, and using it to steal money from online bank accounts.

Competing legal systems, differences of opinion, and distrust proved to be formidable obstacles to cooperation.

“They tried to develop a dialogue that would lead to cybernorms and some understanding of [what the] rules of the road would be and how we would navigate our adversarial relationship,” Hickton said of the Russians. “And that broke down.”

Luke Dembosky, who was the resident legal adviser for the Justice Department in Moscow between 2010 and 2013, told RFE/RL that “it was never easy working these kinds of cases with Russia. There were different systems, different laws, different interests.”

To really make an international cybercase work, Dembosky explained, “you need some alignment of interests and political will, and you need some commonality of law and capabilities.”

More than anything, he said, “you need some modicum of trust.”

A troubled relationship

As U.S.-Russian cooperation stumbled, the FSB’s computer-crimes unit was growing in clout and notoriety, thanks in part to one officer’s previous work as a hacker.

Dokuchayev, with whom the Americans met with during their 2009 meetings in Moscow, was once well-known in cybercircles under the nickname Forb.

He worked with other FSB officers, including one named Igor Sushchin, to recruit hackers to cooperate with the Russian agency on cyberactivities. Among the recruits was Aleksei Belan, who has been wanted by the FBI since 2012 for alleged hacking and computer fraud. 

Officials from the FSB’s Center for Information Security were also involved in the investigation of IT entrepreneur Vrublevsky, the founder of a successful online payment system called ChronoPay.

He was convicted in 2013 of orchestrating an attack on a ticketing system used by the airline Aeroflot. Mikhailov, Dokuchayev’s superior in the computer-crimes unit, testified against Vrublevsky during the trial.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the hackers who broke into email accounts and computer servers belonging to the Democratic and Republican parties during last year’s election campaign did so with authorization from top-level Russian officials.

The declassified summary of a report released on behalf of the intelligence community in January pointed the finger at the FSB’s security rival, the military intelligence agency known as GRU. There was no mention of the FSB, or its computer-crimes unit.

But the previous month, then-President Barack Obama announced new economic sanctions and other punitive measures in response to alleged Russian hacking during the U.S. election campaign.

The list of those targeted included both the GRU and the FSB, as well as Belan and Bogachev.

High treason

Just prior to Obama’s announcement, Russian security officials moved to arrest FSB computer-crimes unit officers Mikhailov and Dokuchayev. That news became public when the Russian newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta reported in January that the two had been charged with high treason for giving classified information to Western intelligence, including possibly the CIA.

In a dramatic twist, according to Kommersant, Mikhailov was detained during an FSB meeting and taken from the room with a bag over his head.

There has been no comment on Mikhailov’s or Dokuchayev’s arrests from the FSB or Russian prosecutors; the only confirmation of their incarceration came from the lawyer for another computer expert also caught up in the arrests.

The U.S. Justice Department did not respond to a phone message or e-mail seeking comment.

In March, Dokuchayev’s name surfaced again when the U.S. Justice Department announced his indictment, and that of FSB officer Sushchin, in connection with the massive data breach at the Internet company Yahoo. Mikhailov’s name does not appear in the indictments, although cyberexperts believe someone identified only as “FSB Officer 3” is, in fact, Mikhailov.

Sushchin, according to the indictment, worked as an undercover officer at the investment bank Renaissance Capital.

That indictment also named Belan, who U.S. officials said could have been arrested by the FSB at the behest of the FBI any time after being named a top wanted cybercriminal in 2012.

Instead, “the FSB officers used him,” according to the indictment. “They also provided him with sensitive FSB law-enforcement and intelligence information that would have helped him avoid detection by law enforcement, including information regarding FSB investigations of computer hacking and FSB techniques for identifying criminal hackers.”

Gray zone

First and foremost, the arrests and criminal charges in both Russia and the United States highlight what experts say is the blurry line between Russian law-enforcement and security agencies and criminal networks, in cybercrime or otherwise.

“Moscow still depends, to a considerable extent, on recruiting cybercriminals, or simply calling on them from time to time, in return for their continued freedom,” Mark Galeotti, a Prague-based expert on Russian intelligence agencies, wrote in a report published on April 18.

It’s a gray zone that poses substantial danger for Russia itself, according to one of the other Russians charged with treason stemming from the December arrests: Ruslan Stoyanov, a former Interior Ministry investigator.

In a letter published by the Dozhd TV channel, Stoyanov, who worked for the Moscow-based computer security company Kaspersky Lab, warned that cooperating with cybercriminals would only embolden them.

“The worst scenario would be to give cybercriminals immunity from punishment for stealing money in other countries in exchange for intelligence. If this happens, an entire layer of ‘patriotic thieves’ will appear, violating the principles of the rule of law and the inevitability of punishment,” he wrote. “We will see a new wave of crime in Russia.”

Former U.S. prosecutor Hickton, who now heads the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, said Russia could have easily arrested Bogachev after he was indicted in 2014 but there is no extradition treaty between the two countries.

Moreover, according to the research firm Fox-IT, the infected computers believed to have been used by Bogachev were also allegedly used to search for information about top-secret government files in places such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey. That suggests the involvement of someone who was more than a mere criminal hacker — perhaps an operative working on behalf of an intelligence agency.

But the arrests also represent another facet of the collapsed relationship between Moscow and Washington.

Hickton said the Bogachev indictment may have been one factor in why U.S.-Russian cooperation in cybercrimes deteriorated. Or it may have merely been a casualty of other points of conflict between Washington and Moscow, such as Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and support for separatists in Ukraine’s east. 

“This all — this all is a mess,” Vrublevsky told RFE/RL. “And it’s a mess to be dealt with in both countries. The sooner the better.”
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Pope Francis leaves Cairo on Saturday after two days of meetings with Egypt’s political and religious leaders. Officials hope the papal visit will jump-start interfaith efforts to curb extremism and sectarianism in the region. VOA’s Heather Murdock reports.
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The European Union has voted unanimously to adopt guidelines to negotiate Britain’s exit from the bloc, the summit chairman said Saturday.

“Guidelines adopted unanimously. [The] EU-27’s firm and fair political mandate for the Brexit talks is ready,” said EU president Donald Tusk, who tweeted from the summit where EU leaders met in Brussels without British Prime Minister Theresa May.

The 27 leaders voted to approve the guidelines in less than 15 minutes.

Talks with Britain will begin shortly after its general elections on June 8.

These talks will focus on issues such as the welfare of EU citizens and families living in the UK, as well as the question of the country’s financial dues to the bloc, as the EU insists that the UK bear all financial responsibility for its withdrawal from the bloc — a bill that could be as high as $65 billion.

The relatively short summit was held exactly one month after May triggered two years of exit talks following a British referendum vote to leave the EU on June 23, 2016.

 
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French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron’s party on Saturday called for the resignation of Marine Le Pen’s father from the National Front after comments he made about a ceremony for the policeman killed in an attack in Paris.

The policeman was shot dead and two others were wounded April 20, three days before the first round of the presidential election that saw Macron and Le Pen go through to the May 7 second round. The Islamic State militant group claimed the attack.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front (FN) party’s founder from whom his daughter has sought to distance herself because of his controversial views, criticized a speech made at the remembrance service by the policeman’s partner.

“The long speech he made in some way institutionalized homosexual marriage, exalted it in a public way, and that shocked me,” Le Pen senior, 88, said in an interview on his website.

“Marine Le Pen has still not firmly condemned these comments,” a statement released by Macron’s En Marche! (On the Move!) movement said Saturday.

“I am asking the candidate to put an end immediately to the duties Jean-Marie Le Pen still carries at the FN,” Benjamin Grivaux, Macron’s spokesman, was quoted as saying in the statement.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party’s management in 2015 after he said World War II Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history, but he remains an honorary president of the National Front.

Conservative to back Le Pen

Le Pen did receive some welcome news Saturday: Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a conservative who was eliminated in the first round of voting, has decided to back her campaign.

 

Florian Philippot, a FN vice president, told BFM television Saturday that the new alliance is “excellent news” and “a turning point in this campaign.”

 

Dupont-Aignan got nearly 1.7 million votes in the April 23 first-round ballot, 4.7 percent of the total. But his switch to Le Pen split his party, “Stand up France,” prompting the departure of a vice president, Dominique Jamet. 

Macron courts rural votes

Macron is hunting for votes in rural areas of France where Le Pen has made inroads among people who feel left behind, with difficult access to public services, mobile phone connections and other modern conveniences.

 

In a radio interview Saturday, the centrist Macron said that if elected, his government would intervene directly if mobile operators fail within 18 months to install high-speed fiber optic and phone networks everywhere.

 

Later, at the farmers market in the central town of Poitiers, Macron defending the European Union and free trade with farmers complaining of low-price competition and the difficulty of getting loans to upgrade farming technology. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Turkish authorities Saturday blocked access to online encyclopedia Wikipedia, an internet monitoring group said, the latest in what government critics say is a crackdown on free speech on the internet.

A block on all language editions of the Wikipedia website was detected at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) Saturday, monitoring group Turkey Blocks said on its website.

“The loss of availability is consistent with internet filters used to censor content in the country,” it said.

When attempting to access the webpage using Turkish internet providers, users received a notice the site could not be reached and a “connection timed out” error. 

Social media 

Monitoring groups have accused Turkey of blocking access to social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, particularly in the aftermath of militant attacks.

The government has in the past denied that it blocks the internet, blaming outages on spikes in usage after major events.

There is no official statement on why the site has been blocked but Turkish media is reporting the cause as “terror-related content.”

Media reports

 

Daily Hurriyet newspaper said Turkey has been in communication with Wikipedia for the removal of content supporting terror and presenting Turkey as a “supporter of terror.”

 

NTV reported that Turkey demanded Wikipedia to open an office in the country, act in line with international law and abide by court decisions and “not be part of the blackout operation against Turkey.”

 

If these demands are met and the content removed, the site would be reopened, according to Turkish media.

 

When attempting to access the site without the use of a virtual private network (VPN), connections time out and browsers alert “this site can’t be reached.”
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A Russian opposition movement founded by exiled Kremlin critic and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky says it plans to go ahead with protests against President Vladimir Putin in 32 cities this weekend, despite the fact that authorities have banned the movement and declared it illegal, and police have raided its Moscow offices.

The Open Russia movement’s spokeswoman, Maria Galitskaya, said the action will be held as planned.

“We insist we do not breach the law since we do not conduct either a meeting, or a demonstration or a picket,” she said.  “We are carrying letters to the president’s reception (office), since someone does not hear us when we do that individually.”

The protests planned for Saturday afternoon will involve submitting letters of complaint to President Vladimir Putin about the situation in Russia.  

“It is difficult to forecast what will be going on at the action,” said Galitskaya.  “We hope we shall submit the letters and quietly leave. We do not plan any law violations from our side.”

“Open Russia” closed?

Russian authorities have not simply warned Open Russia not to conduct any activities, but have blacklisted the group.  

The Russian prosecutor general’s office Wednesday declared Open Russia and two other groups founded by Khodorkovsky to be “undesirable” organizations.  The three organizations are the U.K.-registered Open Russia, the U.S.-based Institute of Modern Russia, and the social movement Open Russia.  

The “undesirable” designation bans them from operating inside Russia, with any violation punishable by fines and jail time.  

Galitskaya spoke to VOA on Friday, just a day after police raided the group’s Moscow office.

“One started breaking open the doors of the rooms and desk drawers, though there was nothing illegitimate in the office,” she said.  “It is difficult to talk about the real reasons of the search but we connect that with tomorrow’s action and think that this is an effort at intimidation.”

The ban is the latest in a longstanding crackdown on civil society, said Amnesty International Russia Director Sergei Nikitin.

“These aren’t the first organizations banned in Russia as ‘undesirable’, but it’s the first time the authorities ban a civil society group that was founded by Russians and operates only in Russia,” he said. “Since its creation, Open Russia has done a lot to support victims of human rights violations in Russia and denounce Russia’s deplorable human rights record, and now itself has fallen victim to the system.”

Khodorkovsky was Russia’s wealthiest man and close to the Kremlin before his outspoken criticism of corruption raised tensions between him and President Putin.  He was sentenced to a decade in prison on fraud charges that were widely seen as politically motivated and the state stripped his Yukos oil company assets over alleged tax evasion and embezzlement.  

Khodorkovsky was pardoned and released from prison in December 2013 and left Russia. In exile, he became even more critical of President Putin and supportive of Kremlin opponents through Open Russia.

A Moscow court on Friday rejected Open Russia’s complaint against city authorities, who had offered an alternative location for its protest, citing public renovation work.  

The prosecutor’s office said the lack of agreement meant any protest would be unauthorized and anyone taking part could be arrested.  

Electioneering?  

Russian authorities have been tightening controls as the country heads toward 2018 presidential elections.  

The crackdown shows they plan to continue repressing political opposition to the Kremlin, says Andrei Kolesnikov, the Carnegie Moscow Center’s head of domestic politics and institutions.  

“The authorities have got two lines of behavior in regard to the opposition – propaganda efforts and repressions,” he said.  “And they provide this line step by step, expressing their readiness to continue this line.”

Russia enacted the law against undesirable organizations two years ago and has used it to ban seven international groups, including The National Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Foundation, and the International Republican Institute.

Russia has also tightened laws and regulations to discourage public protests in an effort to prevent displays of opposition to the Kremlin from getting out of control or attracting too much attention.

Opposition leader attacked, again

Also Thursday, Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was attacked for a second time this year with a green antiseptic liquid known as zelyonka, which was thrown in his face outside his Moscow office.  He was treated in hospital for damage to one eye.   

In mid-March, Navalny was attacked with the green chemical in a Siberian city by a man who pretended to want to shake his hand.  

Russian authorities are trying to shame and scare Navalny, says Kolesnikov.  

“They all try to do something with him – to detain him, etc.,” he said. “I think he is in great danger.”

Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation organized Russia’s largest unauthorized mass protests in years on March 26.  The demonstrations against alleged self-enrichment by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev were broken up by riot police, who arrested hundreds of protesters, many of them minors.   

Navalny, who in 2012 led the biggest anti-Kremlin protests since Putin came to power, plans to run for president in 2018.  Russia’s politicized courts seem intent on stopping him.  In February, he was convicted, on flimsy evidence, of embezzlement. That conviction will disqualify him from running for office if not overturned.   

Throwing the green-staining, noxious zelyonka at critics is an increasingly common tactic of Kremlin supporters.  

This week, unknown assailants threw the antiseptic on investigative journalist Galina Sidorova in the city of Yoshkar-Ola.  A day earlier, Russian blogger Ilya Varlamov was attacked with zelyonka, eggs and flour at Stavropol airport.  

In late February, Putin critic and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov was spattered with green paint at a memorial march for slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.  Nemtsov was shot in the back and killed two years ago on a bridge just meters from the Kremlin and Red Square.  

On Friday, the Russian opposition political party Yabloko (Apple) said one of its campaigners, Natalia Fedorova, was “almost blinded” after a chemical substance was thrown in her eyes by unknown attackers.  She was also hospitalized.  

 
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Russian prosecutors requested a 3½ year prison sentence Friday for a blogger charged with inciting religious hatred for playing “Pokemon Go” in a church.

Prosecutors made the request as the trial of Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, wrapped up in the city of Yekaterinburg. A judge said a verdict in the case would be issued May 11.

Sokolovsky posted a video on his blog showing him playing the smartphone game in a church built on the supposed spot where the last Russian tsar and his family were killed. He has been in detention since October.

He is charged with inciting religious hatred. It is the same offense that sent two women from the Pussy Riot punk collective to prison for two years in 2012.

“Honestly, I’m really in shock that the state prosecutors asked for 3 ½ years,” particularly because it wasn’t a violent offense, Sokolovsky was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

He said he is studying and working and could lose everything, if he is sent to prison.

The state RIA Novosti news agency quoted his lawyer, Alexei Bushmakov, saying he hoped for acquittal or a suspended sentence.
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An American and a British man, allegedly members of the Islamic State group, were arrested in Turkey after crossing the border from Syria and handing themselves over to the authorities, officials said Friday.

A Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government protocol, said American Kary Paul Kleman and Briton Stefan Aristidou arrived at Oncupinar border crossing in Kilis province on April 20 and were arrested four days later.

Kleman was traveling with his Syrian wife and four children. His family was put under administrative detention to be deported to the U.S. in order to keep them together, according to the official.

A British Foreign Office official said British authorities are in contact with Turkish authorities “following the detention of a British man on the Turkey/Syria border.” Aristidou’s British wife and child would be deported to the U.K., according to the Turkish official.

Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency reported Friday that the men were detained and later arrested on suspicion that they are members of the extremist Islamic State group.

Anadolu said two Egyptians and four more children were also traveling with the group and will be deported.
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