It was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness.The group, Baikal Environmental Wave, was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had polluted nearby Lake Baikal, a natural wonder that by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raids.htmlAlso see:Microsoft Under Fire Over Lawyers’ Actions
Even as Microsoft comes under criticism for taking part in software piracy cases against advocacy groups and opposition newspapers in Russia, it is also facing separate accusations that some private lawyers representing the company are involved in corruption schemes.An international anticorruption group, Transparency International, and a major Russian human rights groups, Memorial, contend that some private lawyers retained by Microsoft in Russia were helping corrupt law-enforcement officials to extort money from the targets of piracy inquiries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raidside2.html
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
It was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness.