Russian authorities put global communications providers on a tight leash demanding to gain access to users’ personal data and online correspondence.

A group of deputies representing all 4 political parties of State Duma presented a project of legislations aiming to support surveillance agencies to counter threats to national security.

A separate set of amendments forces telecommunication companies, including hosting providers and website owner to store data on “reception, transmission, processing and delivery of various electronic information” for the period of 6 months.

Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia, Swedish television reported on Thursday, citing leaked documents from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Swedish television said it had obtained the documents from Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who brought NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks about mass surveillance by the agency to world attention. Greenwald tweeted on Thursday that the close relationship between the United States and Sweden could not be "overstated" and that this was the first of many revelations to come. Earlier this year, Snowden leaked details of a global spying programme by the NSA, stirring international criticism. The U.S. has said much of the information was a result of cooperation with other intelligence services.

United Capital Partners, a Russian investor who holds 48% of VKontakte, the second largest social network service in Europe after Facebook, got involved into public discussion around an encrypted IM application Telegram.

Supposedly UCP sent out a letter to Russian media companies describing in detail three negative scenarios for Pavel and Nikolai Durov, creators of Telegram, who also launched “VK” in 2006. The letter included copies of experts’ documents trying to prove that Telegram’s claim as a secure messenger is worthless. United Capital Partners officials refused their relation to the letter.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) wants to gain maximum control over the information on the internet. This was reported today by Kommersant newspaper, which obtained access to a letter of VimpelCom, aimed at the Ministry of Communications. In the letter, the operator gives a number of comments on the draft ministerial order on investigative activities on the internet.

In accordance with the draft order of the Ministry of Communications, from July 1, 2014 all internet providers are required to install network equipment for recording and storing internet traffic for minimum 12 hours, and the security forces will have direct access to these records. 

Countries of greatest interest to the U.S. are China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, according to German weekly.

The United States’ surveillance programs included intensive spying on Germany, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Der Spiegel cited a classified document from the archive of Edward Snowden, the American citizen who fled the U.S. after revealing details of its espionage programs and has received temporary asylum in Russia. According to the report, in April 2013, U.S. officials ranked its espionage targets on a scale of 1 (of highest interest) to 5. 

Mobile phone theft is a huge problem in Russia, just as it is in the United States. But while police chiefs and attorneys general in America are demanding phone manufacturers take action, the Moscow police department is employing a different tactic: Tracking the movements of every single person with a cellphone who enters the city’s subway system.

According to Russian newspaper Izvestia, Moscow police are moving forward with a plan to blanket the city’s subway system with SIM card readers capable of identifying each passenger by their phone number from up to 5 meters away. When a phone containing a stolen SIM card is detected, the new security system will alert police and begin tracking its movement.

The Moscow metro plans to install sensors that will trace passengers by tracking the SIM cards in their mobile phones. The measure is aimed at helping police retrieve stolen gadgets, but rights activists have sounded the privacy alarm over the initiative.

Police operations chief of the Moscow metro, Andrey Mokhov, told Izvestia newspaper that the sensors will become part of the subway’s intelligent security system. According to Mokhov, the action radius of each reading device is five meters. For the system to be successful, he said the devices would have to be installed into every CCTV camera inside stations, lobbies, and metro cars.

The charge: Microsoft is reconfiguring the Skype network so that it Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) can have access to intercept calls over the network to aid in investigations. The reality is of course convoluted with no concrete evidence but it’s worth mentioning what exactly is going on here. So head past the break to get the scoop. 

As Rafael Rivera explained a few months ago is his article about Skype and Windows Phone, Skype’s original network operated on a peer-to-peer node system which means that Skype only initiated the calls but the actual communication was one-to-one with no one as the middleman.