In Russia, every piece of data can be bought—this means not only your passport or insurance number, but also information about your reservations, trips, food orders, taxes and everything else you can imagine. For years, the government has been attempting to put this market under its full control and turn Russia into a digital concentration camp. So far, however, these attempts have been far from successful. While it’s true that Putin’s Russia is a digital surveillance state, it is also true that anyone with financial means and internet access can gain access to the most sensitive data of both ordinary and high-ranking people. Criminals use this information to create intricate scams, stalkers use it to follow their victims, and investigative journalists use it to uncover the state's darkest secrets.
In The Russian Cyberpunk, Andrey Zakharov, one of Russian top investigative journalists, paints the full picture of this wild reality, and makes sense of it. The main characters of the book are people who created this reality: tech moguls (such as Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder), KGB agents, sellers of private information and others major players in the market of de-anonymization and surveillance in Russia. The book explains how this careless attitude towards data and tech can bring the worst out in people, and helps to understand how data can be used against those who are in power.
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Andrey Zakharov is an independent investigative journalist. He previously worked at the BBC Russian Service, Fontanka, RBC, and the Project. He is a four-time winner of the monthly Redkollegia award for journalism. His investigations brought to the public view many of the state’s secrets, including the existence of Vladimir Putin’s illegitimate daughter who has been for years getting money from state corporations. He also wrote a lot about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “troll farm” and its attempt to disrupt American presidential elections, and about the surveillance systems being created in Russia by the Moscow and federal governments. Zakharov was designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian government. His first book, Crypto. How Cypherpunks, Programmers and Rouges Bound Russia with Blockchain, was published in 2023 and has had great success in Russia.