The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

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In an otherwise residential district of southwest Moscow, a nineteen-story gray-and-white high rise, surrounded by a modest fence, could at first glance be mistaken for an average apartment block. But there is something odd about it: Only twelve of the floors have windows.

This building is the heart of the Russian Internet: phone station M9, containing a crucial Internet exchange point known as MSK-IX. Nearly half of Russia’s Internet traffic passes through this structure every day. Yellow and gray fiber-optic cables snake through the rooms and hang in coils from the ceilings, connecting servers and boxes between the racks and between floors. Google rents an entire floor on M9 so to be as close as possible to the Internet exchange point of Russia. Each floor is protected by a thick metal door, accessible only to those with a special card.

On the eighth floor is a room occupied by the Federal Security Service, or Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or the FSB, the main successor organization to the KGB, but the FSB’s presence is evident on all the floors. Scattered among the communications racks throughout the building are a few electronic boxes the size of a video player. These boxes are marked SORM, and they allow the FSB officers in the room on the eighth floor to have access to all of Russia’s Internet traffic. SORM stands for the Russian words meaning “operative search measures.” But, essentially, it’s a back door.

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