Q: "Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?”<p>A:
Putin denied Russian mass surveillance, saying “Thank God, our special services are strictly controlled by the state and society, and their activity is regulated by law.”<p>=====
"Putin denied..."?<p>He didn't deny anything.<p>He avoided answering the question by making generic statement about special services being controlled.
So basically Russia doesn't bother pretending it's not doing domestic surveillance. They don't need to join something like a Five-eyes partnership to get around their own legal limitations. They don't need other countries hacking into their routers or tapping fiber (therefore increasing the insecurity of their domestic networks), instead they are installing their own monitoring devices, albeit at probably a much wider scale than a foreign SIGINT partner could achieve.
Directly to the source: <a href="http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian-communications-surveillance" rel="nofollow">http://csis.org/publication/reference-note-russian-communica...</a>
Well we all knew that the Russians didn't care about privacy ... what was shocking about Snowden revelations is that this kind of surveillance happens in a nation that presents itself as a free country.
Everyone should really be on a VPN. We built an easy way to get your own personal VPN during Sochi, but lots of people are still using it now: <a href="https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn" rel="nofollow">https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn</a><p>The interesting part about this is that the ISPs pay for it. I didn't know that. Forcing someone to pay for you to spy on them is ballsy.