Security officials' requests for telephone and banking data in Russia

Censorship (control) on the Internet. Experience of Russia

Main article: Censorship (control) on the Internet. Experience of Russia

2020: Security officials over 5 years have become three times more likely to request phone bills and bank data of Russians

In 2020, Russian law enforcement agencies sent about 312,600 requests for telephone bills to the courts, compared to 251 thousand a year earlier and 126 thousand in 2016. About this writes RBC with reference to the data of the judicial department at the Supreme Court.

Lawyer Damir Gainutdinov explained the growth of security officials' requests for billing by the head of the Network Freedoms project by the fact that data on connections to base stations can give the security forces a lot of information, even if a person does not use voice calls and SMS.

Mobile phones on which secure instant messengers are installed are still forced to connect to base stations. Information about establishing connections between user equipment, about geolocation, about the time of connection to specific base stations - all this vast array of information has now learned to process much better, this is extremely important and informative data. Therefore, there is growth, "he told RBC.

Also, security officials began to more often request information about bank deposits and accounts. In 2017, there were 139,300 requests for events related to limiting bank secrecy, in 2020 - 260 thousand.

Sergey Shuldeev, a lawyer from the Q & A law office, attributes this to the fact that "the number of crimes" related to the use of bank accounts is significantly increasing, and sociologist Kirill Titaev to the fact that "a new technology has appeared and it is being mastered."

At the same time, the number of requests for wiretapping and access to correspondence is reduced. In 2015, the courts considered 243.8 thousand applications "for control and recording of telephone and other conversations." In 2017, 87 thousand such applications were received by the courts, in 2020 - 34 thousand.

According to Gainutdinov, initially it was wiretapping that was one of the fastest growing segments, from 2007 to 2015 there was a constant growth, and then a fall that coincided with the period of rapid development of instant messengers.^[1]

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