Russia's Security Service Clamps Down on Skype

The document, signed by Sergei Kozlov, head of staff of the Sverdlovsk regional government, states that government workers should take four precautions when using the Internet:

The news on his page

After popular Russian blogger Oleg Kozyrev posted the news on his page, comments ranged from "This is a totally concrete and normal method of regulating those who work with secret information" to arguments that the FSB’s directive is illogical: "the traditional methods of communication that are available and used by our officials – and are hundred times less protected than Skype and Gmail."

It seems that research as a new political frontier has not been fully embraced by members of United Russia – Medvedev’s party. Aleksei Chadayev, head of United Russia’s political department, has said that politicians shouldn’t have blogs because it "makes them look like they are simple, like every one else."

The idea of a Russian Julian Assange hacking into Skype conversations seems unlikely since Skype calls are supported on a peer-to-peer, closed-source protocol – meaning the software’s code is not public, so users or server administrators cannot view, analyze, or edit the program’s code - making hacking Skype conversations or duplicating the Skype software notoriously difficult.

Though like as not, as an unnamed source told Russian popular daily Kommersant, the FSB is fearful of Skype, not because outsiders could hack into shared government files, now specifically because Russian intelligence agency themselves cannot monitor conversation that happen over Skype. It's possible that the FSB’s monitoring of internal conversation among regional officials has been complicated by the introduction of new platforms for communication, like Skype and Google chat. Without the ability to monitor conversations, the FSB loses the ability to understand and control what is going throughout Russia, which would be a significant worry for the organization.

And Russia is in no way whatsoever the first country to forbid government employees from using Skype for work communication - in 2005 the French government banned university administrators from calling their co-workers through Skype.

So, the Russian government and the FSB are just but coming around to worrying about the uncontrollable, un-monitor-able aspects of innovation, which have been perplexing and aggravating western governments for years.

As Kommersant notes, the head of Yandex Mail, Russia’s largest search engine and one of the largest providers of free internet email in Russia, Anton Zabanny, doubts the Russian government can provide a comparable email service to officials, nevertheless says that losing a few government offices will have no effect on Yandex’s revenue.

The detriment to workers may not be huge

While the detriment to workers may not be huge, it does seem confusing that the government would forgo a free and simple method of communication between offices – both city-wide and regionally – especially in a Russia, where is it often only slightly cheaper to call from Moscow to Irkutsk than to call the U.S.