“iPhone is everything”
Presidential administration employees were advised to leave their iPhones until April 1 and replace them with smartphones with different operating systems, writer Kommersant, citing the source. They told employees of the presidential administration that new secure phones would be bought to make it easier for them to give up on American technology.
According to the publication, officials were informed about this at a seminar held in the Moscow region in early March. Similar recommendations are expected to be given to regional officials interested in domestic politics.
“The iPhone is everything. Either throw it away or give it to the kids. Everyone will have to do this in March,” one of the seminar participants told Kommersant.
Another source told the publication that the attendees of the meeting first discussed the necessity of this measure, but Sergei Kiriyenko, the first vice-president of the presidential administration, “put an end” to this issue.
According to the editorial, the internal political bloc of the Presidential Administration, which has been ordered to replace telephones, consists of four departments for domestic policy, public projects, provision of the Council of State activities and the development of information and communication technologies. and communication infrastructure. At the same time, officials of the first three departments will be involved in the presidential election campaign planned for 2024.
Sources explained that the decision to remove the iPhone was for security reasons. They believe that American phones are more prone to hacking and spying by Western experts.
According to one of the sources, officials were advised to buy phones with the Russian Aurora operating system, Android or its Chinese counterparts.
The authors of the article recalled that Aurora is designed to create a sovereign mobile ecosystem in Russia, which should be based on technologies independent of Western IT giants.
“For security reasons”
Kirill Menshov, Vice President of Information Technology at Rostelecom, said in an interview last year that Aurora “contributes to ensuring the technological sovereignty of the state through a secure mobile environment and meets all the requirements of regulators in the field of national security and information protection”. Phones with this operating system can only be used by corporate and government customers.
According to Kommersant, last year Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko told Maksut Shadayev, head of the Ministry of Digital Development, that federal officials should only use “domestic instant messaging tools.” It was also suggested that officers use the native Trueconf platform instead of Zoom.
According to the head of the Infowatch group of companies, Natalya Kaspersky, head of the association of software developers “Native Software”, the more Russians are on the device, the less likely the information from it will go to hostile states.
“But neither option guarantees against leaks. Modern smartphones are basically designed as spy devices: they collect, store and collect information and can transmit it in any direction. And it is impossible to understand where the device is transmitting data because it transmits them in packets and then what happens to them. user cannot follow,” he said.
Political scientist Nikolai Mironov also believes that the iPhone ban for employees of the presidential administration is not related to politics, but to “security considerations”, which is a “purely pragmatic decision”.
And political scientist Vladimir Shemyakin noted that when abandoning the iPhone it is important for authorities to ensure good access to the Internet, instant messengers and social networks. At the same time, according to him, the functionality of a secure phone is often limited.
iPhone in the Federation Council and State Duma
Vladimir Dzhabarov, the first deputy chairman of the international committee of the Federation Council, told RIA Novosti that senators have not yet been advised to abandon the iPhone.
At the same time, he stressed that he was ready to abandon American phones “if necessary” in favor of other device manufacturers.
Dzhabarov added that before important meetings in the Federation Council, parliamentarians handed over their phones.
Yevgeny Popov, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, told socialbites.ca that he did not know anything about the instructions to AP employees to get rid of the iPhone.
“I honestly don’t know anything about it. But I have both Android and iPhone. In principle, everything is fine with Android. Therefore, I think there will be no problems with this. As for Russian systems, they are still quite raw “It’s clear, I don’t think it will take long. There hasn’t been any instructions, so there’s nothing to say about it,” he said.