How the InfoWatch spy femtocell works to intercept mobile phones in the office

Natalya Kasperskaya believes that interception, recording and recognition of all conversations is not a wiretap, because “robots do not have ears to listen”

Three days ago, InfoWatch CEO Natalya Kasperskaya
spoke about the new development of his company - a system for intercepting telephone conversations in mobile networks, with automatic speech recognition and full-text search by keywords.

It is assumed that such systems will be installed in offices for spying on employees of commercial and state-owned companies. Now the security service reads the correspondence of employees by e-mail and instant messengers, listens to conversations on Skype and stationary phones, and scans Internet traffic. The only problem is the cellular communication, which so far escapes from the SAT, because the traffic goes through the base stations of the cellular operators.

Earlier it was reported that InfoWatch office femtocell will be integrated with the core network of the cellular operator so that it becomes a trusted base station of the cellular operator. Then this base station will intercept voice traffic from mobile phones that are in range. ” Upon request, the customer can listen only to corporate SIM cards or intercept calls of all office visitors, as well as listen to employees' personal SIM cards.

Yesterday, Natalia Kasperskaya gave an interview to Kommersant FM, where she revealed some additional details about the operation of the system. In particular, she explained how easily the developers managed to circumvent the constitutional ban on violation of the secrecy of telephone conversations ( Article 23 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation).
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“There is a certain legal restriction related to the analysis of telephone conversations - what is called wiretapping of telephone conversations. Here, of course, there comes a certain confusion, because we have this solution, the majority is automatically called wiretapping. As I have already explained, this is not a buggy - this is exactly the technical solution, where the robot listens. And the robot, generally speaking, has no ears to listen to. That is, there is no fact of a hearing as such, because there is no subject who is listening, ”explained Kasperskaya. - Theoretically, of course, any negotiations are written on some carriers, and then, if any dialogue is interesting, you can listen to it. And in this sense, it will be tapping after the fact. But it is assumed that there may be some protection mechanisms from this, such as, for example, that people who will have the opportunity to listen, will be authorized by the appropriate authority, by the relevant regulations - and whoever can not listen. ”

Thus, InfoWatch believes that the system does not violate the Constitution and the legislature and is not “a special means for obtaining secret access,” that is, it does not even require obtaining a license from the FSB.

“We present a technical solution. The technical solution is to do this to robots, and not to plant people, in fact, to wiretap. For a wiretap, a technical solution is not needed. More precisely not so: interceptors are necessary, but it is not us. We do not deal with the system of operational search activities - this is not our specialization. What we do looks like this: it is a kind of virtual cell that is placed inside. It intercepts calls that go through this virtual cell in the white list. This means that the list is predefined by the employer. And only those phones that fall into this list will be analyzed. What does analyzing mean? This means that the content of telephone conversations is translated into meaning - that is, into text. And already some keywords and expressions are extracted from this text. If employees discuss a terrorist attack, this dialogue will be intercepted, if they discuss any soup or lunch, then this message will probably not be intercepted. ”

In general, Natalia Kasperskaya highly appreciated the Russian software in the field of information security: “We have quite a lot of different software, software, and it is of rather high quality. For example, in the field of information security, we are generally ahead of the rest, because we have several hundred companies that work in this area and produce world-class products that are sold quietly on the world market. I think that several of them know everything: for example, Kaspersky Lab, the same Acronis, Dr.Web, and so on. ”

However, she noted that Russia is lagging behind in the development of operating systems and system programming: “From the point of view of operating systems, we do not have our own OS at the moment, but we have several clones of Linux systems, we have counted about seven independent systems. Formally speaking, they are not domestic, because it is such a common development, which is written by many developers from around the world - and ours are contributing there. On the other hand, this is better than proprietary software, say, from Microsoft, which is wholly owned by Microsoft, with which Microsoft can do anything. ”

Natalya Kasperskaya also stated that over the past two years, the outflow of personnel abroad has increased due to the fact that the ruble fell against the dollar: "The fact is that programmers consider their salaries in dollars, unfortunately, quite often," she is. - It turns out, when you start to compare with the European - oops, our salary becomes lower. And people start to leave. Over the past one and a half or two years, I have heard quite a few such cases when people left the country precisely for mercantile reasons, which, in fact, is very disappointing. ”