Vladimir Putin’s agents have repeatedly intimidated big tech companies
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Vladimir Putin has instituted new and Draconian laws across the Russian Federation, including fines and prison terms for protesting the war or spreading what the Kremlin calls “deliberately false information.” However, Putin’s agents were already at work intimidating executives with big tech companies like Apple and Google before the first tank rolled across the border.
A new Washington Post report reveals how the former KGB spy has worked to crush internal dissent by sometimes going straight to the sources of tools citizens might use to express their true opinions. Last September, after a Smart Voting app associated with Putin foe Alexei Navalny was made available for Russians so they could register protest votes against Putin’s actions, agents showed up at the Moscow home of a female Google executive to intimidate her into taking it down. They gave her a 24-hour deadline. Even though Google quickly took measures to keep her safe, including putting her up at a hotel under an assumed name, agents — likely from the KGB’s successor, FSB — found the exec and let her know time was nearly up. If Smart Voting wasn’t gone by the imposed deadline, she’d be arrested.
Google and Apple both took the app down shortly afterward. The Post says the incident and others like it haven’t been widely reported, but they’ve been going on for a while as part of Putin’s efforts to stamp out internal dissent. Russia has, if anything, been thorough, and additional measures listed in the article make that clear. They include blocking access to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, levying massive fines against any company that doesn’t cooperate with censorship, and even, according to the Post, ordering “13 of the world’s largest technology companies to keep employees in Russia,” so they could answer for their employers’ actions — something the Post says American tech executives call the “hostage law.”
With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s intensified crackdowns have combined with measures taken by companies as well as the US and NATO to create what amounts to an entirely different reality inside the massive nation’s borders. Russian polls — which the Post notes are unreliable — reflect this. A majority of Russians appear to support the war, and Ukrainians with Russian relatives have reported perplexing conversations in which their relations seem to think the war is entirely justified — if they believe it’s happening at all.
After an appeal from Alexei Navalny’s organization, Google made the Smart Voting app available again. That means Navalny’s people, now based in Lithuania, can get messages out there to Russians using Android phones. But in a response to Navalny rep Leonid Volkov, Apple reportedly said the issue was still under review. For now, iPhone users in Russia are apparently just seeing whatever Vladimir Putin wants them to see.
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