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Snowden Used in FSB Campaign Against Western Runet Infrastructure and Apple Smartphones
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Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has utilized Edward Snowden in a recent state media broadcast to substantiate claims that Western intelligence agencies are exploiting international technology firms to monitor Russian officials.
The report, aired on the Russian state-owned Rossiya-1 television channel, alleges that companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Google are operating in partnership with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI to compromise the mobile devices of high-ranking government figures, according to the Agents media on June 8.
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The broadcast mirrors a recent official statement from the FSB regarding an alleged operation to intercept data and wiretap the private communications of Russian officials through the technical infrastructure of global IT corporations.
The report specifically identifies the content delivery and security providers Cloudflare and Fastly as central to this purported foreign intelligence network.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who was granted Russian citizenship in 2022, appeared in the segment to comment on global data practices.
“The largest telecommunications companies all over the world are building the basic internet and telephone networks that move your messages from your gadgets into the world,” he stated. “Most of the data is transmitted in an unencrypted form, which means your communication from the electronic sphere’s point of view is naked.”
Snowden further referenced his 2013 disclosures, emphasizing that he believes the public did not fully grasp the implications of the Prism program at the time. “The most important thing is, I’m not sure people understood the meaning of this at the time. The fact that the manufacturers of the most important operating systems in the world for our devices, Microsoft, Apple, Google were partners in the Prism program,” he remarked.
In his appearance, Snowden highlighted what he described as a new trend in global surveillance: the use of artificial intelligence to monitor the entire population rather than specific targets.
“Instead of ‘first identify the object, and then track it,’ we got ‘first track, then identify the object.’ What does this mean? This means that now you can get almost any information about any person without them having committed a crime and without any suspicions regarding them. This is a new model. Even in top-secret documents, it talks about collecting all possible information, about wiretapping everyone,” Snowden said.
This broadcast occurs against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing effort to restrict the use of foreign technology following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Snowden, who sought asylum in Russia in 2013, has since become a Russian citizen, living in Moscow region.
Previously, Russia's security services disabled parts of the surveillance system that protected Vladimir Putin and his inner circle after the assassination of Iran's supreme leader highlighted how artificial intelligence could be used to track targets via camera footage.
The Kremlin grew alarmed when reports indicated that intelligence agencies utilized software backdoors in Tehran's camera network to locate senior officials. In response, Russian engineers sealed the system off from the internet before reactivating it, as FSB director Alexander Bortnikov warned that the nation's surveillance apparatus had become a liability that adversaries could exploit.
Fearing similar breaches by Ukrainian intelligence, Vladimir Putin suspended his visits to standard residences and relocated his operations to hardened bunkers in the Krasnodar region.
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