Russian meddling in Kamailio project - sr-users

1 Apr 2018

Good one!!!! Made me really laugh

Le dim. 1 avr. 2018 00:44, Alex Balashov
<abalashov@evaristesys.com <mailto:abalashov@evaristesys.com>> a
écrit :

    (Filed by the Geostrategic Open Source Alliance.)

    ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2018)--In a twist of events that has
    shocked the global
    technical community, the well-known open-source VoIP
    professional Alex Balashov
    has revealed himself to be a deep cover intelligence operative
    of the GRU
    (Main Intelligence Directorate of the military of the Russian
    Federation) and
    the FSB (the Federal Security Bureau, the successor agency to
    the Soviet-era
    KGB).

    Balashov was reported to be seeking US political asylum and
    immunity from
    prosecution in return for an exposé of the ways in which the
    Russian foreign
    intelligence apparatus has sought to influence the direction
    of the open-source
    communications project "Kamailio", widely used in
    telecommunications carrier,
    service provider and enterprise environments to deliver
    high-scalability
    routing services and other SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)
    platform building
    blocks.

    In connection with these sensitive ongoing negotiations,
    Balashov was debriefed
    on behalf of the US Government by Fred Posner of The Palner
    Group, a
    counterintelligence think tank and security consulting firm
    based in
    Gainesville, Florida. This debriefing was coordinated with the
    German BND
    (Bundesnachrichtendienst) agency and other agencies
    representing security
    cooperation partners of the European Union and NATO.

    GOSA have been able to obtain exclusive excerpts from the
    portions of this
    interview not deemed top secret:

    POSNER: Please state your full name, age, place of birth, physical
    characteristics, serial number and any other relevant
    professional asset
    identification markers.

    BALASHOV: [redacted]

    POSNER: You have made the claim that Kamailio has been
    infiltrated by Russian
    spy agencies. Given that it's an open-source project, that's a
    bold and
    provocative claim. Where's the evidence?

    BALASHOV: Infiltration is perhaps strong word from spy novels.
    Reality is less
    thrilling. As you are knowing from controversy about election
    of our Donald,
    covert global influence today is mainly question of soft power.

    POSNER: Is there an obvious way in which this applies to the
    Kamailio project
    you can show us? I remind you that you have staked your
    personal freedom on
    this issue.

    BALASHOV: Influence is delicate matter. Da, of course there
    are some
    superficial indications...

    POSNER: Such as?

    BALASHOV: For example module to support language Squirrel.
    What is Squirrel?
    Who uses it? If you take a look at code is a bit complicated,
    da? What does it
    do?

    POSNER: It is a bit complicated, But I'm not convinced. Sell me.

    BALASHOV: It was in fact committed to GitHub by former Eastern
    Bloc
    personality, yes? Very complicated code for unknown mystery
    language support
    from Eastern Europe...

    POSNER: Yes, from the main developer and leader of the project.

    BALASHOV: Hmm.

    POSNER: What else?

    BALASHOV: There is a Ukranian [redacted] who is in charge of
    many SIP captures
    with system which diverts them to central database, yes?
    Something with name
    from ancient Greek troubadour or myths maybe?

    POSNER: We'll have to look into that.

    BALASHOV: Kamailio World is held every year in East Berlin.
    Every year back to
    Berlin.

    POSNER: So what?

    BALASHOV: Where do most guests of it spend their night?

    POSNER: [audible crack of pistol whip] This is not a quiz
    show! I ask the
    questions here.

    BALASHOV: Yes, yes, okay, they are at the Park Inn at
    Alexanderplatz.

    POSNER: And?

    BALASHOV: The history of this hotel in East German times and
    Stasi presence
    there...

    POSNER: That aspect of history is well-known.

    BALASHOV: Da... then is clear.

    POSNER: What are the strategic goals of Russia with regard to
    open source
    communication infrastructure?

    BALASHOV: From news lately can be seen that is soft power
    leveraging and
    economic sabotage.

    POSNER: Economic sabotage? How will they achieve that with
    open source?

    BALASHOV: Again is question of delicate influence in small
    ways. This is not
    time of Arab dignitaries visiting KGB hotels in Moscow in
    1970s or this kind of
    naked and obvious trick.

    POSNER: [raises pistol] You are here to provide specifics.

    BALASHOV: Yes yes, okay. Well, I am not policy architect at
    Khoroshovskoe
    Shosse, but general point of view with colleagues is that best
    approach to
    Western countries is to encourage kind of "boondoggles" [air
    quotes] which
    consume large economic resources with very little benefit.

    POSNER: Does Russia create boondoggles in America?

    BALASHOV: No no. We don't have this level of direct influence
    to create per se.
    You can see from recent activities of Internet Research Agency
    for example that
    the successful approach is the one which will amplify or grow
    existing
    boondoggles which lead to kind of systemic dysfunction,
    through for example
    injection of kind of "memes" [air quote gesture] and "trolls"
    [air quote
    gesture].

    POSNER: Where has Russia been successful at this specifically
    as it relates to
    the Kamailio, the VoIP industry, and real-time communications?

    BALASHOV: The GRU are very successful at disinformation
    campaign to convince
    business executives about cloud things. They are always
    listening to our
    "thought leadership" [air quote gesture] to move to cloud,
    mostly Amazon Web
    Services, which is great for us since is worst possible
    approach. At industry
    events our people are always pushing very much cloud cloud
    cloud, you know,
    like a stampede of rhinoceroses to cloud, don't miss out on
    cloud! Don't be
    left on the ground, fly away to cloud! We have great podcas--

    POSNER: --stop. But there is a legitimate value proposition
    for service
    providers in moving to the cloud, isn't there?

    BALASHOV: Yes, for some maybe, but for example AWS is platform
    not designed at
    all for telecom, is kind of Node.js and Ruby on Rails hosting
    service.

    POSNER: Where is the economic sabotage?

    BALASHOV: Well they are spending one month $30,000 to Amazon,
    next month
    $35,000, next month $40,000, always bigger instances, bigger,
    bigger, to handle
    even very basic work. Official sexy seduction mythology is you
    can fire all the
    system admins and no longer replace hard drives at 3 AM and
    forget all this
    messing with hardware.

    Is very hard to resist for big business leaders who follow
    classical Western
    management consulting sermon from 90s about "divest yourself
    of non-core
    competencies" [air quote gesture]. You know, it is same advice
    they come to
    give to us in Gaidar and Yeltsin days. From my memory was not
    working out well
    until First Marshal Putin took different approach...

    POSNER: Let's stay focused. Surely companies can run the
    numbers for themselves
    and see if it makes sense for them?

    BALASHOV: Maybe, but where we have the success is in the
    exploit of the fear of
    missing out, I think is called "FOMO" [air quote gesture]
    nowadays. Everyone is
    moving to cloud, don't get left behind, even if unit economics
    of it are
    disaster for your product and your company. Have you heard
    about the cloud?
    It's future!

    POSNER: And this has been successful?

    BALASHOV: Hard to measure but for example there is major
    increase in mailing
    list posts about putting Kamailio in Amazon EC2, EC2, endless
    EC2 from people
    for whom it is obviously wrong thing. Lots of wheels spinnink,
    spinnik, making
    fire and sparks, light and heat going into cold, empty outer
    space, to keep warm
    our GLONASS satellites. But where is result?  All cost
    increase. And still the
    $3000/mo instance does not process small amount of packets
    that is nothing for
    bare metal server.

    Meanwhile spendink, spendink, solvink big amounts of kind of
    fake problems... I
    heard this expression once in Atlanta, "keep up with Jones"
    [air quote
    gesture]. I don't know who is Jones but everyone agrees is
    very important to
    keep up with h--

    POSNER: --back up. Fake problems?

    BALASHOV: Maybe is better word: unnecessary problems that come
    from way AWS
    inside workings. Stupid network constraints, stupid puzzles
    for puzzle-solvers.
    What is American term, "eager beaver" [air quote gesture]?

    POSNER: Apart from tying up resources, how does this
    enthusiasm for AWS help
    Russia?

    BALASHOV: Well it should be obvious that having whole industry
    pay huge premium
    price to centralise their infrastructure at one entity is both
    economically
    wasteful and precarious. Fragile and expensive setup is like
    our Soviet economy
    at end of eighties. Also havink resemblance to old-times
    mainframe computing is
    top secret irony nobody sees.

    POSNER: Where else is Russia seeding economically harmful memes?

    BALASHOV: Other big initiative is encourage huge
    overinvestment in WebRTC
    because is supposedly future of real-time communications.

    POSNER: But WebRTC is real.

    BALASHOV: Da, of course, sometimes workink fine, but eats up
    big engineering
    capital and talent fighting always browser bugs and incompatible
    implementations and always changink changink changink.
    Meanwhile who is caring
    for fundamental SIP services?

    POSNER: And this is a form of economic sabotage?

    BALASHOV: Of course is sabotage. If you can make much of a
    sector of economy to
    obsess always about some toy and create kind of echo chamber
    of "visionary"
    [air quote gesture] commentary about it it is negative for GDP
    and innovation.

    "Vision" has shown the big success for us; is perfect concept
    in hand of
    intelligence agency because nobody is knowing what it is but
    everyone so
    desperate to show they have it.

    POSNER: So a large-scale movement of VoIP service providers to
    the cloud and
    big development around WebRTC represent Russian attempts at
    sabotage of the
    Western real-time communications industry?

    BALASHOV: Well again, these tendencies are existing before. It
    is more question
    of amplifying and boosting and promoting them so many actors
    are distracted
    from important things. American business guys are very
    vulnerable to it; every
    time they are asking, "this does not seem to be worth it for
    us?", always they
    hear from friends at country club, "you need more bold vision
    and company
    culture of innovation, my friend".

    We have learned after some years and applying KGB psychology
    training to
    exploit their big personal insecurities about many things. For
    example they see
    competitor have Cloud Business Analytics, they too must have
    now Cloud Business
    Analytics, not for any reason, just fear, insecurity, the
    angst about not
    having enough "Big Data" [air quote gesture].

    POSNER: What else?

    BALASHOV: In recent years can be found thought leadership to
    remove direct
    sales because is inefficient, too high customer acquisition
    cost and so forth.
    Always now resellers, channel partners this and master agents
    that. Common
    sense shows industry cannot support chain with big depth of
    reseller of
    reseller of reseller with everyone wanting to be reseller and
    nobody selling
    actual products to the real people.

    POSNER: That's not new to telecom.

    BALASHOV: No, no, but now new twist! They are now having
    everything "as a
    service" [air quote gesture], platform-aaS, infrastructure-aaS...

    POSNER: Okay?

    BALASHOV: But also now infrastructure management-as-a-service
    and kind of meta
    approach, management-of-management-of-platform-aaS. Resellers
    of resale
    platforms of platforms of platforms.

    Maybe not quite clear, but this is special recursive sense of
    humour tradition
    in Russia. Put endless things inside things inside things like
    matryoshka
    doll. Again--

    POSNER: --matryoshka? Like the Russian nesting doll?

    BALASHOV: Yes yes, nesting doll.

    As I was saying key point is lots of "activity and buzz" [air
    quote gesture]
    which is parasitism by another name. Lots of energy and
    enthusiasm, big
    banners, hype from UC press, LinkedIn Pulse CTO insights,
    cheerleadink, but
    where is result?

    POSNER: How is this all tied to Kamailio?

    BALASHOV: Some of it is not directly tied. It is more idea
    that Kamailio is
    tool for executing "big ideas" [air quote gesture] and
    "platform plays" [air
    quote gesture].

    When you are reading mailing list post like, "how to scale up
    with Kamailio to
    deliver cloud WebRTC solutions for the enterprise?" and wonder
    with yourself
    "from where this small guy got such 'big ideas'?" is often
    result of
    Russian-sponsored so-called thought leadership. Who is he? He
    does not have
    enterprise!

    POSNER: What's wrong with that question?

    BALASHOV: Well from our point of view nothing; great question,
    bold and
    inspiring! We are encouraging them always to go build
    grandiose megalomania
    ideas, telling to them, yes, "boil the ocean", "be disruptor
    2.0", etc.  Have
    you seen ITEXPO? Ideally also raising some venture capital to
    erase value from
    fund limited partners portfolio, like pension funds,
    university endowments.

    Although sometimes we feel sorry, knowink they will not meet
    the success, and
    almost have heart to tell them is just trollink, but our
    government is clear
    about goal: work hard every day to suck money out of American
    economy.

    POSNER: So it is in Russia's interest to see big ideas funded
    in America?

    BALASHOV: Oh yes yes! Bigger is better! First mover advantage
    and network
    effect, go big or go home trailblazink! On every time someone
    gets the Series A
    for "completely transforming the way you do the business with
    UCaaS" [air quote
    gesture] or like "a new kind of next-gen VoIP peering" [air
    quote gesture] we
    are having another champagne bottle at the headquarters.

    POSNER: This does not really sound like traditional
    intelligence work.

    BALASHOV: Is not. We are livink in Internet cultural moment,
    is about memes,
    engineering perceptions and mass behaviour, new kind of value
    creation.
    Likewise destruction.

    POSNER: We will consider your asylum application in detail. In
    the meantime,
    you will be detained at [redacted] as before.

    BALASHOV: This is famous American tradition of "customer service"?

    POSNER: We call it "customer success" nowadays.

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