Hacker Cinema
Navalny
2022 · Film · documentary · 98 min
Directed by Daniel Roher
Follows the man who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning with a lethal nerve agent in August 2020. During his months-long recovery, he makes shocking discoveries about the attempt on his life and decides to return home.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
On the one hand Its fun to watch movies alone on a big screen. My area of NJ apparently could care less about movies like Knock Down The House(Biography of AOC and other house candidates), Navalny (Movie about the murdered politician opposing Putin), The Imitation Machine: Movie about Alan Turing or Last Night in Soho (A wonderful Edgar Wright thriller)
On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to care enough about these topics. Instead the latest superhero movie is next door packed to the brim and is so loud it rattles the walls to the room playing my quiet documentary with only me sitting inside watching it. :/
Christo Grozev was also featured in the documentary Navalny, that was awarded with Oskar in documentary category.
This is sufficiently-well established presently that it's almost hard to find specific documentation as it's largely accepted fact. I'm finding few hits post-2019, so it's possible that data practices have improved.
WNYC's On the Media carried several interviews with a documentarian filming Alexy Navalny as Navalny and the documentarian team identified Navalny's (initial) would-be assassins, including various FSB agents. They specifically targeted a person they'd think might have weak opsec, a scientist directly engaged in producing nerve agents (novichok IIRC). His core competence was chemistry rather than spycraft. The documentary team included a former Bellingcat investigator:
Brooke Gladstone: In the months following Navalny's poisoning, Christo Grozev, former lead Russia investigator at Bellingcat, was stuck in Vienna with filmmaker Daniel Roher. The two had just been booted from Ukraine where they had been trying to film an investigation. Now Grozev had lots of time on his hands and a laptop and a fresh stack of data from the Russian black market....
Christo Grozev: When we were looking at the Navalny poisoning, we thought, "Well, they must have used the same scientists. They can't have hundreds of scientists who do this. This has to be kept top secret. These people have to take the risk to manufacture this toxin." I started looking at the phone records of these scientists, and we bought them on the Russian markets where you can buy absolutely any kind of data.... [Navalny's people] provided the data of how Navalny had traveled to what locations. I matched it to the known travel data of the poisoners and spies. We saw this pattern, essentially a group of six to eight FSB poisoners had been tailing him for more than four years to a total of 66 different towns and cities.
<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/revisiting-documentary-navalny?tab=transcript>
Other general coverage (searching "russia black market data"):
"Russian data theft: Shady world where all is for sale" (26 May 2019)
According to cyber-security experts, vast quantities of supposedly private data - including from Russian state institutions - are bought and sold every day....
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307>
And for a long time. From 2009:
Goldmine of black market in Russian data
Gorbushka Market, just outside central Moscow, does a thriving trade in any electronics good you could want: mobile phones, plasma television sets, the latest DVDs, and, if you ask to see them, software peddlers will show potential clients a list of “databases”.
These consist of CDs with names such as “Ministry of Interior – Federal Road Safety Service”, “Tax Service” and “Federal Anti-Narcotics Service” and cost about $100 apiece. Each contains confidential information gathered by Russian law enforcement or government agencies: anything from arrest records, personal addresses, passport numbers, phone records or address books to bank account details, known associates, tax data and flight records are on offer...
<https://www.ft.com/content/07dedd34-d921-11de-b2d5-00144feabdc0>
Archive: <https://archive.is/UPPHK>
And 2005:
"In the stolen-data trade, Moscow is the Wild East"
<https://web.archive.org/web/20050708015611/http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050705.gtrussia05/BNStory/Technology/>
Adjacent article on Bellingcat OSINT generally (2024), though nothing on black markets:
"The forensic empire that is Bellingcat"
<https://www.theprojectcounselgroup.com/2024/06/19/the-forensic-empire-that-is-bellingcat/>
> nerve toxin in underwear.
This fact came from one of the people who was involved in putting it there. Navalny phoned a Russian guy pretending to be another Russian official, asked him how this op went down and the dude said the toxin was in his underwear. You can see this all in the documentary.
Your attitude is misplaced, so much that one wonders why you're posting this.
It's no more or less ironic than Navalny the documentary being produced by CNN films.
If you're a dissident rival foreign powers will give you a platform which you won't get domestically.
Plenty of Russians think Navalny was a traitor because he made western documentaries. It's good to know you agree with them that releasing dissident material with a hostile foreign power means he is automatically a traitor I guess.
I wouldn't say that that is a position I agreed with though. I would say the principled stance is that dissidents should use the options available to them to avoid being silenced - hostile power or no.
We can't all be principled though, can we?
The 2022 documentary 'Navalny' is important and explains how the anti-corruption campaigner got to that terrible place, being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and still deciding to go back to Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF_HsKCWEHw (trailer)