Russian investigative journalism is flourishing alongside “probiv”, the buying of data on phone calls, cell location, or air travel off Telegram or the dark web
A new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin's power. Tweets: @albertwenger , @benweinthal , @andrew__roth , @rasmus_kleis , @jaycuthrell , @yashar , @anthony , @dicktofel , @hshaban , @michaelsderby , @lionelbarber , @jerometaylor , @samanthajpower , @brian_whit , @crtejada , @mattzeitlin , and @evangershkovich See also Mediagazer Tweets: Albert Wenger / @albertwenger : Privacy—or lack thereof—always cuts two ways https://twitter.com/... Benjamin Weinthal / @benweinthal : “To be an independent journalist in Russia is like being a lobster in a pot,” said Meduza's editor in chief, Ivan Kolpakov. “They are boiling you, but you don't know exactly when you will die.” cc: @Kasparov63 @chessninja https://www.nytimes.com/... Andrew Roth / @andrew__roth : Good piece by @benyt on probiv, the online sale of any Russians' personal data that has energized investigative reporting in Russia. Researchers are retroactively uncovering crimes by the FSB going back years in a nightmare for the intelligence services. https://www.nytimes.com/... Rasmus Kleis Nielsen / @rasmus_kleis : “There's a tendency [now] to reflexively decry the rise of alternative voices and open platforms” @benyt says. “Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that [,] power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world's most corrupt governments” https://www.nytimes.com/... Jay Cuthrell / @jaycuthrell : 1) Techniques ignore borders. 2) This reminded me of when “spoofing” or “pretexting” scandal was, well, scandalous. Scandals led to laws. 3) For the US legal system, slow reactive regulation and legislation to keep up with nouveau inference data, metadata, etc is very on brand. https://twitter.com/... Yashar Ali / @yashar : How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia A new wave of news outlets has used conventional, and unconventional, methods to pierce the veil of Putin's power. @benyt reports https://www.nytimes.com/... Anthony DeRosa / @anthony : “The irony is delicious, of Mr. Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Richard Tofel / @dicktofel : It's founder “modeled Proekt on the American nonprofit news organization ProPublica” https://www.nytimes.com/... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a nonprofit Russian investigative site: “since we live in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let's forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Michael S. Derby / @michaelsderby : “Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world's most corrupt governments.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Lionel Barber / @lionelbarber : Investigative journalism is a growth business in Putin's Russia. Many fascinating insights here on cheque book journalism, personal courage and people whose first names are usually “Roman” https://www.nytimes.com/... Jerome Taylor / @jerometaylor : “There's a tendency in parts of the American media right now to reflexively decry alternative voices and open platforms as vectors for misinformation. Russia is a potent reminder of the other side of that story,” - @benyt https://www.nytimes.com/... Samantha Power / @samanthajpower : Incredible @nytimes story about how investigative journalism is flourishing in Russia, with “Putin seeing his own tools of corruption and surveillance turned against him by the underpaid police and intelligence officials who put the secrets up for sale.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Brian Whitaker / @brian_whit : How investigative journalism flourishes in hostile Russia https://www.nytimes.com/... Carlos Tejada / @crtejada : “The audience doesn't care whether you bought data or got it from a source ... since we live in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let's forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Matthew Zeitlin / @mattzeitlin : “Russia is possibly the most transparent country in the world...If you have 10 bucks, you can find any information on anyone.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Evan Gershkovich / @evangershkovich : good on @benyt for noting the most important trend in Russian investigative journalism: “A confusingly high percentage of the founders of these new outlets are named Roman.” https://www.nytimes.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
A new wave of Russian investigative outlets — iStories and Meduza among them — has paired conventional sourcing with 'probiv', the Telegram-and-dark-web market for Russians' phone records, cell location, and air travel data, using it to retroactively document alleged FSB crimes. The move lands inside an arms race the related coverage maps in detail: an investigation built on nearly 160K Roskomnadzor documents exposed the scale of the state's surveillance and censorship apparatus, while a separate look traced the cottage industry of oligarch-linked tech contractors supplying digital surveillance tools to the FSB.
The significance is symmetry: the same data exhaust the security state collects to watch its citizens is leaking back out through gray markets and becoming raw material for the press challenging Putin's power.
First-order effects
- Outlets like iStories and Meduza gain a reporting channel that bypasses official secrecy entirely — purchased call logs and travel data let them reconstruct FSB activity without a single cooperative source inside the agencies.
- The FSB and Roskomnadzor now face exposure not from whistleblowers but from their own data infrastructure, since every record collected is a record that can be resold.
Second-order effects
- The surveillance vendors profiled in the contractor coverage — Citadel-linked firms building FSB tooling — become higher-value targets for exactly these investigations, because each exposed dataset points back to who commissioned it.
- The state's countermove risks sweeping up legitimate journalism alongside criminal data buyers, tightening pressure on independent outlets already operating under legal and physical threat.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, authoritarian surveillance systems carry a built-in contradiction: the more comprehensively a state digitizes its citizens' lives, the larger the gray-market surface available to journalists, criminals, and foreign actors alike — a dynamic echoed when the FBI ran geo-targeted recruitment ads at disgruntled Russian embassy staff.
- Investigative journalism structurally shifts away from insider sources toward data forensics, making outlet survival depend less on protecting sources and more on acquiring, verifying, and publishing datasets the state never consented to share.
The trend: As states digitize surveillance, the resulting personal-data markets are becoming a double-edged infrastructure that investigative journalism can buy into even as it documents the apparatus that created them.