The database of e-mails addressed to the KGB of Belarus is published – messages have also been received from residents of Latvia / Article

The Belarusian “cyber guerrillas” are a decentralized organized group of activists that became active after the unfair presidential elections held in the neighboring country in 2020. They are fighting against the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, conducting cyber attacks against various state institutions as well as the media. Some of the cyber attacks were also carried out with the aim of hindering the transportation of Russian military equipment to the war zone in Ukraine.

In mid-April, a large-scale cyber attack took place against the state-owned company “Grodno Azot”, which, according to activists, is actively involved in repression against the company’s employees. At that time, they managed to encrypt part of the data and delete others. In exchange for restoring the data, they demanded the release of several dozen political prisoners, including those working in the company.

Last fall, cyber partisans hacked the website of the State Security Committee of Belarus. They managed to extract a large amount of information from it, from which about 40,000 messages were distributed, which were sent to the intelligence service to an electronic mail address.

Many of these messages are duplicates, so the activist group separated the duplicates and posted about half, or 20,000 messages, online. They cover the period from September 2014 to August last year. The outcome of the cyber guerrillas’ activity is that the website of the State Security Committee has not been fully accessible for a couple of months.

Among the reports, there are many requests for information, among them from relatives of formerly repressed persons. But there are also reports that call for an investigation into the activities of certain institutions, companies or people.

As reported by the journalists of the Belarusian editorial office of “Radio Brīvība”, classic complaints about other people’s behavior are only about five percent of the total volume of published content, which would correspond to about 2,000 reports. Another part of the writers expresses their readiness to cooperate with the State Security Committee of Belarus. Among them are also people who live abroad.

Over the past couple of weeks, independent Belarusian journalists and media have been actively working on these reports and investigating what their impact might have been. There is evidence that after receiving certain reports, the special services targeted the persons mentioned in them.

Latvijas Radio contacted freelance journalist Nastas Zahareviča, who has researched the database of leaked reports. She has also familiarized herself with the messages sent by people living in Latvia.

The journalist is preparing material on this topic. It should be noted that there are relatively few such reports. She did not manage to contact all the authors of the reports living in Latvia. In the following Zaharevich’s conclusions after studying the reports.

“It seems to me that this leak from the Belarusian KGB can become a very important sign for Europe [valstu] security services, so that they understand that it is not only necessary to prohibit issuing visas to citizens of Russia and Belarus. They must also understand that there are spies with European Union passports. When they only work with Russian and Belarusian passport holders, they are not really solving the problem. It sounds beautiful, people like easy solutions to complex things. But that doesn’t really address the issue. They need to work harder and deeper. They should be aware that, unfortunately, the citizens of Latvia and Lithuania are ready to work with the KGB of Belarus,” Zahareviča said.

To Latvijas Radio’s question about what these reports show about people turning to the State Security Committee as an institution with the belief that it can provide any kind of help, Zahareviča answered that she was surprised by the level of people’s trust in the special service.

She mentioned that even people from Russia have written to the KGB, ignoring the fact that it is another country’s intelligence service. For example, while preparing material on reports related to construction work at a nuclear power plant in Belarus, she noticed that most were written by Russian citizens working there about violations or shortcomings during construction work.

“You know, I’ve seen different types of people. This was perhaps the most surprising to me. People who really believe that the KGB will solve all the issues, they complain about other institutions. I think this also shows the image of the KGB in Belarus, that it is something semi-secret, semi-magical. If this structure works semi-secretly, then maybe people believe that their abilities are semi-secret. So they can do more than we can imagine. This myth is made up by people.

I cannot fathom how anyone can trust that the KGB can help them, but some people do. And also people from abroad,” said the journalist.

Zahareviča expressed hope that people will become more cautious before contacting the KGB. Many of the people she spoke to living in Latvia, who were once in contact with Belarusian spies, were surprised that their reports had come to light.

However, the journalist emphasized that the publicly available reports do not show the reports of permanent agents.