Still, parliamentary democracy is wonderful. Only parliamentary democracy can reveal to the world the true face of any administrative machine. No matter how sophisticated people make up this machine, one day some senators will send them a request. A request whose idiocy degree is not limited to anything at all.

Like, say, a request sent by senators from the US Democratic Party to the FBI. Namely: is the popular FaceApp app a threat to US national security? Since it is, firstly, developed in Russia. And secondly, it collects personal data.

And the representative of the FBI, who is obliged to answer - as in spirit and answers. The following is a literal translation of the answer, which explains its somewhat slantiness from the point of view of the Russian language:

“The FBI considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, as a potential counterintelligence threat, depending on whether the product collects data, its usage policies and privacy, as well as legal mechanisms that allow the Russian government to have access to data inside the borders of Russia. "

Well, that is, American counterintelligence considers a foreign application that collects personal data of Americans and capable of (potentially) transmitting this data to a foreign government as a threat to its national security. Is there anything funny about this? No, there’s nothing funny about that. If the American counterintelligence did not think so, then it would have to be immediately dispersed to hell.

Because just as any intelligence officer is obliged to always believe that he is being monitored, any counterintelligence agent must suspect a spy in everyone. Not to mention the citizens of other countries. Because it is his first professional duty. He is paid for it. Budget money.

This applies to the special services of any country, the United States and Russia. That is why the FSB requires encryption keys from Telegram. And that is why laws are being passed on the storage of personal data in the country of residence of the owner of personal data. But alas, with all due respect to the noble task of the security services to protect national security, all these actions are useless. Because the world has changed.

However, let me first explain to you what is the danger of the spread of personal data in other jurisdictions. It doesn’t matter here whether you personally and personally agree to transfer your age and gender to a service built by a citizen of a potential adversary. It is important that the mass transfer of such data to a potential adversary will allow, for example, to roughly estimate the parameters of the male population of draft age. What in case of a possible war is important information. And the military does exist to always proceed from assumptions about a possible war.

Analysis of search queries can reveal the peaks of certain epidemics - by searching for symptoms or drugs. And knowledge of epidemics among a potential adversary is also important data in the context of a war.

And I don’t even stutter about geotags, which are generally heavenly manna for any planning special operation. Especially due to gender and age.

So do not laugh at personal data. It was not worth laughing at the “spy stones”, about which I had a lengthy discussion with AB Nose, who believed that in the era of the Internet, the use of such methods of transmitting classified information is nonsense. In the end, I still managed to convince the opponent that the scout should always proceed from the fact that he was being monitored (I already wrote this above), but this does not mean at all that he should not work. No, it should work.

But if you are being monitored, then your every Internet connection is sorted by bytes, if not by bits. And if it is encrypted at least a thousand times, a method will be found to decrypt it - there are many such methods. In the case of a receiving stone lying in the park among other stones, counterintelligence is powerless - you just go, you see if someone is following you, and intercept a low-power radio signal, the radius of which is no more than a meter or two, without coming up to you, impossible. Subsequently, as you know, everything was confirmed.

But still, I repeat, the world has changed. And we can oblige the conditional Gapple or Aggle to store the personal data of their citizens in our territory. But we cannot control what happens to this personal data before it is saved. As a scout using a computer, he cannot control what happens with his report before it is encrypted. Therefore, only paper. Only cipher notebooks. Only old school hardcore.

Similarly, any “key transfer” requirements are useless. Even if you imagine a hypothetical situation where the messenger changes its functionality to suit the requirements of special services (changes end-to-end encryption, for example, to encryption on the server side or arranges the transfer of end-to-end encryption keys to the server) and still transfers the encryption keys to whom it should be, what prevents potential terrorists and drug traffickers immediately create another messenger? The program is not very cunning, and its mass distribution is not required - whoever needs it knows.

The world has changed, but special services continue to resist these changes by old methods. And if in the case of the cipher-block notebook this can be justified, then in the case of attempts to catch up with the escaping train of horizontal globalization, this is pointless. Personal data can no longer be protected - which means that they must be resisted by other methods. Active. And, of course, illegal.

However, if you ask me how to counter the new threats, then I will not answer you. If I knew this, I wouldn’t write columns for you, but I would do something else. But in general, common sense tells us that in the conditions of a new global world it is no longer possible to try to pupate, as was possible thirty years ago. And so the only way out is to forge relationships with everyone and agree.

However, this does not mean at all that the military and special services should relax.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.