Russian secret service agents have recently advised regional government officials across the country to stay away from foreign webmail services such as Google’s Gmail and instead use domestic ones. Three independent unidentified sources with knowledge of the development have told the Russian political and business daily Izvestia that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) sent a memo to the telecom authorities of Russia’s regions two weeks ago, strongly advising them against the use of Gmail and other overseas services. Some local administrations in Russian southern Rostov region immediately followed the order. The recommendations came following the revelations by US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden of Washingtons spying and surveillance activities across the globe. Snowden, who was granted political asylum in Russia in August, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Earlier in October, a new document leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA “is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans,” the Washington Post reported. “During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250?million per year,” the report added.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 15:48:48 +0000