PRESS: Russian officials say US services may access their data

MOSCOW, Aug 23 (PRIME) -- U.S. special services may have access to Internet traffic of Russian citizens when it is abroad, business daily Vedomosti reported on Wednesday, citing an unnamed federal official and a source close to high-ranking officials.

One of the sources said that Stockholm accommodates a big center of the U.S.’ National Security Agency that has access to the traffic passing through major Internet exchange points: U.S. special services can read data from these points, decode them and search by key words, which they do to detect terrorists.

Along with personal data of certain users, the traffic that flows abroad contains information on banking transactions, state data, and officials’ correspondence, the people told Vedomosti.

IT company’s Inoventica General Director Vitaly Slizen said he knows about at least one center of traffic analysis, working in the interests of special services, which is located in London, close to a big Internet exchange point.

Major Internet exchange points in London and Frankfurt get the data exchanged by users inside Russia, he said.

Traffic of Russian citizens goes abroad when they surf foreign services and resources and local ones, and operators run traffic across Europe without a real technical necessity, the sources said.

The official said that Russian subscribers often make requests to Western resources since the bulk of services are abroad, but European and U.S. subscribers rarely visit Russian resources.

As European exchange points do not sell outcoming traffic separately from incoming one, but sell it in packages, operators fill a spare channel with internal Russian traffic, which makes a loop and leaves Russia, the official said.

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