Russia has installed an all-encompassing surveillance system at the site of next year's Winter Olympic Games in Sochi that will allow security services to listen in on athletes and visitors.
The surveillance system, known as SORM, was first developed by the Soviet-era KGB, predecessor of the FSB special services, in the mid-1980s.
It has been updated in recent years to keep tabs on the Russian opposition, among other things, prominent security analyst Andrei Soldatov said.
SORM will give Russian security services free access to all phone and internet communications at the Olympic Games in February without the providers' knowledge, according to research by Soldatov and his colleague Irina Borogan.
Telecom providers are required to pay for the SORM equipment and its installation, but law enforcement agencies will be able to wiretap without having to show providers court orders allowing the eavesdropping, the analysts said.
"Operators do not know what and when the FSB is monitoring," Soldatov, who collaborated on the project with Citizen Lab, a research centre at the University of Toronto and UK-based charity Privacy International, told AFP.
Citing research based on documents published by the Russian government procurement agency and other state records, analysts said the authorities have been installing the surveillance devices in the Black Sea resort of Sochi over the past few years.
Russia has pulled out all the stops to get the subtropic region ready for the Games, spending more than $US50 billion ($A53 billion) on infrastructure improvements.
"There is a promise that visitors will have access to the fastest WiFi networks in Olympic history, for free," the researchers said on their website agentura.ru.
But at the same time, analysts said, national telecom provider Rostelecom is installing DPI (deep packet inspection) systems on all its mobile networks, technology which will allow the FSB not only to monitor all traffic but also to filter it.
While many Olympic host countries take steps to monitor communications for security reasons, Russia has taken surveillance to a new level, Soldatov said.
Share
