Kremlin Wiretaps Dissident Blogger — Who Tweets the Bug
August 9th, 2012Via: Wired:
Alexei Navalny showed up to work in Moscow on Monday to discover he was being bugged. He called the police, like many perhaps would, but not before tweeting photos and video of himself and his colleagues taking the Kremlin’s monitoring devices apart.
It’s not hard to figure out why Navalny was bugged. He’s one of Russia’s most influential anti-corruption bloggers and is at the center of a protest movement aimed at toppling the regime of President Vladimir Putin. Since late July, the 36-year-old lawyer has faced possible arrest, trial and up to 10 years in prison for charges Putin’s prosecutors claim stem from an embezzlement scheme, but which Navalny and his supporters claim is an attempt to silence him.
The discovery began when Navalny’s colleagues at the watchdog group Anti-Corruption Fund had just returned from vacation, and “just for a giggle,” inspected his office with a “bug detector,” Navalny blogged. And as a prominent opposition figure, the odds that Navalny was being spied on were pretty good. Using the detector, his team found a device attached to wire hidden inside the wall molding. “Experts, what is this?” he asked his Twitter followers, attaching a photo. The strange device was apparently a microphone.
