Also here's the full phone call with the FSB agent, with english transcript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwvA49ZXnf8

That spy is likely to experience "health problems," sooner or later...

A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.

EDIT: After watching / reading the article and also the comments about parallel construction, there is indeed an inordinate amount of information being just there for the taking.

The BBC did a documentary on this intelligence black market some time ago[0], which shows the magnitude of it. I can't really imagine how it's like living over there, think 4-chan-on-steroids levels of doxxing that can be unleashed by anyone with some petty cash.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307

We all live in the world where telecoms spy on everyone's location and where travel information is accessible to unlimited number of people (it's super easy to get air travel info in western countries too). It's just funny how adding a bit of corruption can completely compromise state's own spy agency.

First he had to have access to them to put poison. Then he later got access to them again to scrub them clean of the poison. I guess Navalny has no security whatsoever where he stays?

1) A trained FSB operative completely fell for a convincing enough social engineer, armed with nothing but caller-id spoofing software. Even though he was extremely apprehensive in the beginning of the call, he was slowly "eased into" talking top-secret stuff on the non-secure phoneline. This was so incredible that his last words on the call were "I was shocked by your questions. Was this OK that we talked about this on a non-secure line?". That's crazy. What chance do normal people have against such a good social engineer?

2) The amount of pro-Putin commenters in this thread (mind that some of these comments are dead), claiming that this is a CIA false flag or some such.

If another world power was investigated over a potential assassination and had such lax control over civilian personal data, would it be as easy to derive the chain of command and movements of their agents?

Would the cover identities be so shoddily arranged as to use the surnames of their spouses to make them easier to remember?

Or is this unique to Russia and this particular organization of the FSB.

Similarly, regarding the ongoing Solarwind attack, what is the tradecraft of the folks involved in that mission. Not only their opsec but in their own personal coms? Will we see an independent investigation that reveals the calls and networks of the hackers?

Navalny isn't alone in this; I get the same reaction when I hear about teenagers lying about their age to go to war, or activists spending decades in prison and continuing to fight as soon as they leave, or even Hannibal crossing the Alps. Independently of whether the overarching cause is rational or beneficial or not, these acts of living are almost completely alien to the sensibilities of a modern day worker in an industrialized attention economy.

I said it multiple times how ridiculous I find that so many people readily buy into these stories. But... I don't know now, this was pretty convincing, to be honest. Not really a "proof" of anything, of course — this guy could be anyone, and of course it is really weird how he didn't recognize Navalny's voice and talked about all this stuff over the insecure line... But I can believe that. I mean, if it was fake, it was some really impressive fake, with much better script and acting than anything I can now remember. My biggest issue was believing that people doing important stuff in FSS can really be useless idiots, and this was such a convincing portrayal of such an idiot that I'm starting to accept it.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to hear more of that story.

Any silovik worth his salt would refuse to discuss such a hot topic over an open line. Also, some people noticed their talk is not even close to how two professionals both working in the kontora would speak. And how come 'the spy' didn't recognize his target's voice and manner of speaking? How come he didn't cross check 'the assistant' with his boss?

Not to mention that Navalny having such information about FSB agents means he's got some suspicious connections. Wouldn't he go to jail for this when he's back to Russia?

Org charts with names and faces should accompany a far wider range of malfeasance. I get this is a nice, cute, morally unambiguous story against a state enemy so CNN can do this, but there are many environmental disasters and domestic political decisions that can be traced up and down the chain.

It would be great for things like DDT, the petroleum industry denying their own global warming studies, tobacco denying their own cancer studies.

Youtube video will get huge amount of likes and views. But that's it.

The first part we'll never know, but he really has no security and it is known that he's always the only tenant of his hotel room. Might have come into his room in the morning and sprayed them with Novichok while he was showering.

Thanks for the spit-take. Note to self: put underpants in same security category as my phone.

Exercising my self judgement doesn't make me pro Putin, nor does it make me a conspiracy theorist when I wonder why the flu killed more people in France in one month (jan 2017) than COVID in 10 months.

I have a brain, I use it. Maybe sometimes I come to the wrong conclusion but at least I don't just regurgitate what the media feeds me.

So in this case I find strange that the super Russian spies never manage to kill anyone even when they use military grade chemical agents that are supposed to kill full cities (remember the Skripal case, this one was fishy as hell too).

This has been the reality in China for a while now and the result has been... largely fine. eg: This Reuter's piece from 2018 where you could get a picture of anyone's face for $1USD and a copy of their phone records for 50c: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-dataprivacy/data-du...

Like, if you ask a representative sample of people living in China what they feel the top 10 pros and cons of living in China were, that all of their personal information is for sale for a few bucks would not make it onto many people's lists on either side, it doesn't really affect your day to day life.

There are a lot of theoretical privacy attacks that sound scarily creepy but privacy advocates tend to play up the hypothetical and not look at how empirically impactful such things end up being.

I don't think you would... The voice alone would give it away. There's no way the leader of the opposition isn't famous enough to be recognisable on the phone...

> A glimpse of the future for those supporting these kinds of laws because they have nothing to hide.

I don't think that's necessarily true, because pervasive and tolerated corruption is required to get an end state like that. If a country has "[those] kinds of laws," but unlawful access is investigated and prosecuted, then the data will remain (more or less) restricted to police and government investigators.

So, even though you still have to worry about the police and government abusing the data, as well as certain powerful or connected people, you won't have to worry so much about stuff like your SO buying your phone records for $10.

The one they got to talk was in the cleanup crew, so probably not as familiar with him.

https://youtu.be/smhi6jts97I