Outmoded as that may sound, the remark was in line with Putin’s long-established communication habits, which have apparently made him a very hard target for foreign spies. Unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose phone was tapped for years by the U.S. National Security Agency, Putin does not do text messaging. He has no social networking pages. He gets his news from the daily briefings of his own spy agencies. And as early as 2005, at the start of his second term as President, Putin said that he does not own a cell phone. “If I had a mobile phone, it would never stop ringing,” Putin said when asked about this most recently in 2010. “More than that, when my home phone rings, I don’t ever answer it.” That seems astounding for the leader of a country that has more activated cell phones than people and more Internet users than any other nation in Europe. But in some ways Putin’s technophobia is part of a Russian tradition older than the telephone itself – an aversion to blabbering that has been hardwired into the national psyche after a century of life in an industrial police state. In Soviet times, the eavesdropping practices of Putin’s alma mater, the KGB, even gave rise to a Russian saying that my grandmother still uses when talking to my mother. “This is not a telephone conversation,” Russians like to say in the middle of a telephone conversation, reminding each other that only the most innocent chatter is safe to transmit over an insecure line.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:27:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015