Telegram-correspondence became the reason for initiating a criminal case in the Altai Territory. Alina P., a Russian woman who moved to Ukraine, in a personal correspondence offered to help a friend from Tyumen with housing and contacts in Kharkov. Now she is a defendant in a criminal case on an "illegal armed formation." How the correspondence got to the FSB officers and on what basis is unknown. Lawyers Yevgeny Smirnov and Dmitry Zakhvatov explained that access to personal messages is possible only on the basis of a court or with the consent of the person himself. According to Smirnov, since the beginning of the war, the security forces began to show more interest in personal correspondence.
Zakhvatov, in a conversation with The Insider, suggested that the case was most likely not initiated on the basis of correspondence. Most likely, the man with whom Alina P. corresponded went and wrote a denunciation against her, Zakhvatov believes. “How legal is it to use correspondence to initiate a criminal case? Why not, it’s legal, but as a general rule, you need to get permission from the court,” he said.
According to Smirnov, this is far from the first case when a case is initiated in Russia on the basis of personal correspondence, there are a huge number of such cases. The question is how legally access to the correspondence was obtained, he notes.
“We have a constitutional right to the secrecy of correspondence, so access to it should have been granted voluntarily or on the basis of a court decision. If all these procedures are followed, the correspondence can be used as evidence.
After the start of the war, there were more cases when personal correspondence was read, for example, by FSB officers when crossing the border. They ask to open the phone, show correspondence in Telegram or other messengers. After such a person is often issued under an administrative article, for example, for disobedience to a police officer, and sent for 15 days. During this time, they receive all the necessary legal court decisions and access to the telephone, after which they legally secure access to this correspondence and initiate a criminal case.
Perhaps this is sometimes done through surveillance, if this surveillance was sanctioned by the court. This spring, there were several cases where such alarming signals were present: allegedly, there was some kind of secret correspondence in Telegram. It is not clear whether this correspondence was opened by technical means or whether they [the FSB officers] got it just like that. It was written in the documents: “As a result of removing information from technical communication channels, access to the correspondence of the Telegram messenger was obtained.”
A case was opened against Alina P. “on complicity in preparation for participation in an illegal armed formation on the territory of a foreign state.” The case was initiated on November 17 by employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Center for Emergency Control with the assistance of the FSB of the Belgorod Region under Part 5 of Art. 33, part 1, art. 30 h. 2 tbsp. 208 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.