Several Swedish media - Radio Sweden, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and many others - published a series of articles accusing the largest network and telecommunication company in Sweden and Finland, TeliaSonera, of cooperation with the Belarus KGB and other secret services of in post-Soviet countries.
In Belarus, TeliaSonera has a subsidiary company - mobile operator Life - ZAO "BeST". Also, the Swedish-Finnish company is entrenched in the markets of other authoritarian countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
As reported by he Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, TeliaSonera and anti-democratic regimes are both interested in such cooperation. It brings a lot of money for doing business in the region to TeliaSonera and puts mobile operators under the control of bloody anti-democratic regimes.
With the help of TeliaSonera, the regimes can track correspondence, telephone calls, location, and movements of their opponents.
Journalists from another influential Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, emphasized the technical quality of company services. For example, a subsidiary of TeliaSonera - the Belarus operator Life - uses the equipment of a renowned worldwide group Ericsson. In democratic countries, the tracking technology is used by police with the sanction of prosecutors in order to expose robbers, murderers, drug dealers, but in Belarus, they are used by intelligence services to intimidate and punish political dissidents.
As a classic example, the journalists refer to Belarus events of December 2010, when mobile operators blocked some democratic opposition websites for their clients and provided technical services for the KBG allowing to eavesdrop conversations of political opponents of the oppressive regime, and disclosed information about their users, which ultimately led to arrests of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators.
Many Swedish experts in the field of communication technologies think that Telia Sonera that went to the markets of totalitarian countries knew from the very start that it would help dictators to eavesdrop what they want and when they want.
According to Professor Eric Strom from Geteborg University, more and more governments are interested in controlling the population by means of cellular communication after the Arab Spring.
To find and intercept the user is absolutely no problem. Moreover, Telia Sonera, or to be exact its subsidiaries in Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, developed a program of "black boxes", with access to it by secret police of these countries.
In response to the charges, Telia Sonera says it "must adhere to the laws of the country in which it operates. "
The Belarus KGB is closely cooperating with the Russian FSB (former Soviet KGB) which persecutes the Kavkaz Center for reporting truth about Russia for more than 10 years.
It is not quite clear if the Swedish company Telia Sonera also adheres to Swedish laws inside Sweden.
In January 2012, Telia Sonera, which is a higher-level provider for the Kavkaz Center, blocked access in half Europe to our website, which is officially registered as a Swedish media outlet, for a period of about two weeks, without any previous warning or explanation.
Telia Sonera provides the access to the KC in several European countries, including Poland, Germany and Austria. The company never answered to the letters from our viewers in these countries with a request to apologize and explain the reasons for the fortnight blockade.
It is worth reminding that on September 15, 2011, the Russian terrorist gang of "Russia's Prosecutor General's Office" gave an assignment to the Russian terrorist gang of the FSB Russia to "close down" the Kavkaz-Center in the West.
Starting from June 6, 2012, i. e. for almost a month, the Kazkaz Center is now under the most powerful DDoS attack in history, resulting in KC almost complete disconnection from Internet, except for very short morning vodka breaks sometimes, usually lasting for no more than half an hour.
In the period between our blocking by the KGB-friendly Telia Sonera in January 2012 and the beginning of the blockage in the West by continuous DDoS attacks (it is a criminal offense all over the world; in England, for example, it is punished with jail term of up to 10 years) on June 6, 2012 , a Russian thug, "ambassador" of Russia to the UN Churkin, raised the issue of the closure of the KC by Sweden two times at the meetings of the UN Security Council, "reminding" Sweden that, as he claims, the Kavkaz Center was allegedly banned by the UN Security Council as a government news agency of the Caucasus Emirate, banned by the UN SC in 2011. The Russian thug Churkin lies as every Russian KGB man. In fact, the Kavkaz Center has nothing to do with the CE government being an independent news agency and therfore is not subject to any "sanctions" by the UN Security Council for "terrorism".
After the second Churkin's "reminding", Sweden answered to the Russian thug "ambassador" Churkin, through Swedish representation office at the UN in New York, that Swedish authorities are unable to close down the KC because such a move would violate the Swedish laws.
In contrast to the present jamming of the KC by most powerful DDoS attacks, the blocking of the Kavkaz Center by Telia Sonera in January 2012 proved to be inefficient because not all the traffic from Sweden went through the company. The rest went through other Swedish providers. So our viewers in affected countries could read the KC using proxies, anonymizers or the window in "Google translate". Therefore, the assignment of the Russian gang "Attorney General#s Office" to fully close down the KC in the West was not fulfilled.
This criminal "assignment" was fully realized only now, with most powerful cyber-terrorist attack by the FSB (KGB). The DDoS does not allow using proxies or other anti-censorship tools as no country in the world is left unaffected.
According to the KC data, the KGB (FSB) first got interested in the Swedish-Finnish Telia Sonera Company when it became the direct Kavkaz Center provider in 2004. As reported by Reuters, the Russians insisted then that Finland closes down our website, and a representative of the company, Jyrki Karasvirta, said that Telia Sonera has no reasons to do that.
"Our lawyers and police checked the website for the last 24 hours and did not find any materials allowing to close it", he said in 2004. It seems that much has changed in the relations between the company and the oppressive regimes in post-Soviet countries since then.
Department of Monitoring
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