The swing year was 2013. In August, after weeks in bureaucratic limbo, Edward Snowden left Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and accepted asylum in Russia rather than risk any further international travel. Durov, who called Snowden “my hero,”[374] immediately offered him a job, which Snowden declined. In a gust of pro-Russian effusiveness, Durov said: “In such moments one feels proud of one’s country and regret over the course taken by the United States—a country betraying the principles it was once built on.”[375]
In a perfect piece of chessboard symmetry, within a matter of months Durov the anti-Putin would be forced into exile and end up in the United States, working in secrecy and freedom in Buffalo, New York, on Telegram, his secure communication app. Putin had apparently decided that he didn’t need both Durov and Snowden on his side of the chessboard, especially with Durov offering Snowden work and lionizing him. Snowden’s value was not a matter of any intelligence bonanza—his value was purely symbolic, i.e., political—his presence would be a constant mocking of the United States’ impotence. In the meantime Putin’s cronies seized financial control of VK in a buyout that left Durov with something like $300 million to $500 million. That was money that could not be spent in prison, as Durov was reminded when a case of his driving over a policeman’s foot was concocted against him, the fact that Durov didn’t drive was hardly an obstacle.
Durov, now a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, leads a nomadic life, traveling from hotel to hotel, country to country, with a small band of devoted techies who helped him perfect Telegram. Though it quickly gained 100 million users a month, Telegram has yet to show a profit and costs Durov something like $1 million a month. Among the hundred million users of Telegram’s secure communication system were the ISIS jihadis who left 129 people dead in the November 2015 Paris attacks.
Snowden may yet prove to hold a surprise for Putin, who thus far has seen him pretty much as a godsend. Snowden provides Putin with cover for repressive actions against the Russian Internet. Granting Snowden asylum reverses the old Cold War paradigm in which persecuted Russian culture heroes like the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov were given shelter and freedom in the United States. Now in the IT twenty-first century, the most famous IT refugee is living safely in Russia, free enough even to criticize Putin from time to time—in August 2016 Snowden tweeted in response to new legislation increasing surveillance and sentences while reducing Internet freedom in Russia: “Putin has signed a repressive new law that violates not only human rights, but common sense. Dark day for #Russia.”[376]
This is a rare enough occurrence if only because common courtesy, gratitude, and the instinct for self-preservation prevent Snowden from criticizing his host overmuch. Their relationship is at best an uneasy one. Snowden’s tenure in Russia is entirely based, like everything else, on the whims and interests of Vladimir Putin. Snowden is a chip that can be called in at any time—as part of a deal that, say, lifts sanctions and at least tacitly recognizes Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, a deal that will appeal much more to a President Trump than to a President Obama.
As far back as July 2015, when Donald Trump was only one of the many vying to be the Republican presidential candidate, he called Snowden a “total traitor,” adding enigmatically that Putin would immediately surrender Snowden to him: “If I’m president, Putin says ‘hey, boom—you’re gone’—I guarantee you that.”[377]
On the other hand, Snowden is by his very nature a wild card. He may not be cooped up in two rooms like Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but when you are not free to come and go as you please, even the largest country in the world can start to feel confining. Snowden may yet once again do something bold and impulsive that snares the attention of the world.
Reluctantly, Putin was being pulled into the realm of cyberpolitics, which were proving every bit as important as geopolitics. That realm had already generated great wealth, great power, great names—Gates, Jobs, Snowden. And there was a new name on the rise—“Guccifer”—which as its creator would explain was a mix of “the style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer.”[378] That creator was a Romanian hacker in his early forties by the name of Marcel Lazar. At the time of his arrest by Romanian authorities for cybercrimes in that country he gave as his profession unemployed taxi driver, which is about as unemployed as you can get.
Using nothing fancier than an NEC desktop and a feel for how people created passwords, he cracked the accounts of, among others, Colin Powell, Candace Bushnell, and Sidney Blumenthal, confidant and adviser to Hillary Clinton. In cracking Blumenthal’s account Guccifer was able to reveal that Clinton was using a private email account to conduct official State Department business, which led to an FBI investigation and haunted her throughout her presidential campaign.
Snowden had demonstrated how a state could be weakened by leaks; Guccifer had demonstrated how specific political figures could be weakened, not so much by the contents of their emails but by how they used the email system itself.
From the very start Putin had suspected that the Internet itself was a “CIA project,”[379] one whose ultimate aim was to infiltrate and weaken Russia, if only because the last thing the West wanted was a strong Russia. Putin publicly voiced those suspicions in 2014 and soon thereafter began to take actions that would wrest control of Russia’s Internet away from the CIA and its various minions, witting and unwitting.
Sometime after being driven through the ghastly emptiness of Moscow’s streets to his inauguration in May 2012, Putin began to slip deeper into the twilight of paranoia. This is a state of mind in which outlandish fears can be both sincerely believed and cynically exploited for political purposes.
The Moscow street demonstrations could not have been the product of injustice and outrage—someone had to be behind them, since someone always was. In this case that someone was Hillary Clinton. Putin said: “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work.”[380]
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,”[381] 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.’”[382]
375
Chris Boyette, “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg Offers Edward Snowden a Job,” CNN Money, August 5, 2013.
376
Andrew Roth, “Putin Signs New Anti-Terror Law in Russia. Edward Snowden Is Upset,”
377
David Sherfinski, “Donald Trump: Putin Would Return ‘Total Traitor’ Snowden If I’m President,”
378
Andrew Higgins, “For Guccifer, Hacking Was Easy. Prison Is Hard,”
379
Ewen MacAskill, “Putin Calls Internet a ‘CIA Project’ Renewing Fears of Web Breakup,”
381
Ilya Khrennikov and Stepan Kravchenko, “Putin’s New Internet Czar Wants Apple and Google to Pay More Taxes,” Bloomberg Technology, February 8, 2016.