Criticism
The FSB has been criticised for corruption and human rights violations. Some Kremlin-critics like Yulia Latynina and Alexander Litvinenko have claimed that the FSB is engaged in suppression of internal dissent. Litvinenko died in 2006 as a result of polonium poisoning. The FSB has been further criticised for the failure to bring Islamist terrorism in Russia under control. Peter Finn of the Washington Post has claimed that FSB exercises huge political influence in the country.
In his book Mafia State, Luke Harding, the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian from to 2007 to 2011 and a fierce critic of Russia, alleges that the FSB subjected him to continual psychological harassment, with the aim of either getting him to practice self-censorship in his reporting, or to quit the country entirely. He says that FSB used techniques known as Zersetzung (literally “corrosion” or “undermining”) which were perfected by the East German Stasi.
It is also suspected, but not proven, that there is a FSB sub-department running operatives and or sympathizers to plant monitor and censor entries in the RUSSIAN WIKIPEDIA, as well as to plant monitor and censor selected entries related to Russia and Russians in the former Soviet space in English WIKIPEDIA. Evidence of the latter is present in patterns of entry revision and protection that systematically present a Russian view favourably and excise or remove critical accounts drawing attention to Russia's role as an imperial colonialist power within the former Soviet space past and present. Some of the pseudonyms behind such entries, changes revisions and locking that keep reappearing are "GARIK" "bbb23" and "Beaumain."
Read more about this topic: Federal Security Service (Russia)
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