Spy Files Russia: Peter-Service

Spy Files Russia was presented as a continuation of our Spy Files series. Its only listed release, on 19 September 2017, contained 209 documents — 34 base documents in different versions — from Peter-Service (Петер-Сервис), a company founded in St Petersburg in 1992 as a provider of billing software that became a major supplier of software to Russia's mobile telecommunications industry. The documents, mostly in Russian, are dated between 2007 and 2015.

The material is largely technical documentation for Peter-Service products, including a data-retention system that, according to us, stores subscribers' communications metadata for three years as Russian law requires, a 'Traffic Data Mart' that records and categorises mobile internet traffic, and an interface through which state agencies submit search requests. It also includes a 2013 conference presentation promoting a deep-packet-inspection product, DPI*GRID.

I set the release against the background of SORM, the system through which Russian communications providers must give state agencies access to communications, and the 2016 'Yarovaya' laws. I noted that the European Court of Human Rights had found Russia's SORM legislation in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in Zakharov v. Russia (2015).

I did not identify our source. The release was published with La Repubblica (Italy) and Mediapart (France), listed as media partners. TechCrunch reported at the time that it was not possible to verify the veracity or value of the documents, and noted our own caveat that the documents do not mention the FSB but refer only to 'state agencies'.