Putin

The Arab Spring, the Moscow protests, and the damage caused by Guccifer made Putin realize that he had underestimated the power of the Internet. His parliament at once began drafting bills for laws that required foreign social media websites to locate their servers in Russia and to retain all information about users for at least six months and make it available on demand to the authorities. Another law blocks Web sites entirely even without a court ruling. Another makes any blogger with more than three thousand followers bear the same level of responsibility as mass media companies, meaning he or she can face heavy fines for positing incorrect information. Nearly any expression of critical thought can be labeled “extremist” and punished as such. Denial-of-service attacks against opposition Web sites became more frequent. An army of well-paid trolls posted pro-Putin comments on Russian and Western news outlets.

In late 2015 Putin invited Herman Klimenko, a programmer and Web entrepreneur, to serve as his official adviser on the Internet. Born in 1966, Klimenko is closer in age to Putin than are most of those active in Russia’s Internet world. Balding, bearded, he has an avuncular twinkle in his eye and a wit that can cause him to refer to Russia ironically as a “banana republic,” but there is no doubt about his good-soldier attitude. In fact, his first statement about his decision to accept Putin’s offer was couched in military terms: “When I served in the army, there would be orders for officer appointments. Simply out of respect, you were given three days to weigh the orders. It was understood that, on the third day, the answer was always ‘yes.’”

And “yes” is the word Putin is most likely to hear from Klimenko, who quickly went on record as saying: “Now the Internet is flooded with money, and criminals, and terrorists. Of course, all this needs to be regulated.”

Klimenko went after Google and Apple in much the same way the EU has, demanding that they pay significantly higher taxes than they currently do. He summed the situation up rustically: “We are breeding the cow and they are milking it.” Klimenko has a strong ally in parliament who is sponsoring a bill that would impose an 18 percent value added tax on the revenue generated by Google, Apple, and other such companies. In the odd-bedfellows department, Klimenko’s ally in parliament is none other than Andrei Lugovoi, one of the two former KGB men accused of assassinating Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London in 2006.

In the three years between the Guccifer revelation of Clinton’s private email account and the Guccifer 2.0 hack of the Democratic National Committee, a great change took place within the citadel of Putin’s mind. His initial responses to the Internet were those that were to be expected—curtail and control. At first, he failed to appreciate the full potential of hacking, being more interested in the gems of useful information that could thus be obtained and in the bragging rights that came with it—Russia’s hackers are stronger than yours.

But in the case of the hacking of Sidney Blumenthal’s correspondence with Hillary Clinton, there was very little useful information, and the hacker himself was a Romanian, hardly an occasion for nationalist chest-thumping (though Guccifer did use a Russian proxy server).

It was true that all the emails from Blumenthal, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation, were marked “Confidential” and claimed to contain intelligence “from extremely sensitive sources.” But then something rare and difficult to grasp began to happen that took Putin time to understand: It wasn’t the stealthy skill of the hacker that mattered, and it wasn’t the “sensitive” intelligence that was splashed all over the world’s media that mattered. What mattered more than any of that was that Secretary of State Clinton was using a private server for official communications. It was the delivery system that counted, not the content. Once again the medium was the message.

Another new use for the Internet was found in connection with former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died so hideously and so publicly from polonium poisoning in London in 2006. In Putin’s eyes Litvinenko had committed three unforgivable sins. He betrayed the brotherhood of the KGB, the vilest of treasons. He incriminated Putin in the supposed FSB bombing of three residential buildings in 1999, which were to set the stage for the second Chechen war and thus strengthen Putin’s position as president. He accused Putin of being a pedophile.

No one can be more vicious in exchanging insults than ex-KGB. Their accusations should be considered baseless unless supported by hard evidence. There is some evidence that the FSB was involved in the detonation of the buildings, none whatsoever for Putin being a pedophile.