Without special permission I could watch people.” Who builds the surveillance system for Rus...

Forwarded From Важные истории

“Without special permission I could watch people.” Who builds the SORM surveillance system for Russians. The story of one programmerFrom the age of 16, Ivan Kirsanov from Zelenodolsk near Kazan attended protest rallies, and by 21 he was already writing code for systems used to surveil Russians. The shipbuilding college student was bored and decided to study programming. That was how Ivan landed an internship at Sber at 19. Very soon he was invited onto the staff, managed to move to Moscow, rent an apartment, buy a motorcycle, and visit Sochi for the first time.

When the salary at Sber stopped satisfying him, he found a more attractive job at the Nizhny Novgorod company MFI Soft.

There the young man was promised open-plan offices, kitchens with breakfasts, a laptop, and 200,000 rubles net. The company’s field of activity was not of decisive importance to Ivan. At the interview he was told the work was connected with the “Yarovaya package.”

At that moment I just nodded into the phone and said: “Wow, that’s cool.” But in fact I didn’t care at all. I had never heard of this company.

That was how the young programmer Ivan Kirsanov ended up working for the Citadel holding. It is the main manufacturer of surveillance systems for the FSB and is additionally controlled by the son of the first deputy head of that same security service, Sergei Korolev.

Ivan joined there in the summer of 2023 in the department that deals with internet traffic. He had to refine a product after engineers who came from the security services. They wrote bad code.

They have good training, but little exposure because they can’t work in ordinary commercial companies,

a senior colleague explained to Ivan.

After the war began, the “FSB-developer guys” disappeared somewhere. Perhaps they were needed in another sphere.

In 2025 Ivan “realized that some kind of horror was happening in Russia, that there was a war” and left the country. Now he works part-time as a shepherd on a farm in France, picks strawberries, plays computer games, and rides a bicycle.

Kirsanov took an archive of technical documentation on SORM with him when he left.

Important Stories spoke with Kirsanov and studied the archive. We explain what is known about the FSB’s most odious and mysterious surveillance system and the people who develop it.

👉 Read the full investigation on the website and watch the video version on YouTube →

App | YouTube | Telegram | X | Instagram

YouTube

He made software for the FSB and fled Russia to a farm in France. The story of a programmer

russia #fsb #interview

Ivan Kirsanov developed systems for surveilling Russians — SORM. These programs are used by the FSB, including to fight dissenters. At the same time, Ivan had oppositional views since school and attended rallies in support of Alexei…