Suddenly, in February, Syrov resigned. The BSK owner, Yuri Skorokhodov, told me in March that he will not give in to blackmail and stands ready to take this case to court. The service provider has ample grounds for a legal case. Limitation of this right is permitted only on the basis of a judicial decision. Our legal system retains certain atavistic traits dating from the Soviet period when legal norms were arbitrarily applied.
Many Russian laws suffer from an identical defect, supporting a very broad range of interpretation.
To press its case, the FSB has been able to exploit a seeming contradiction in the law. On the one hand, the court decision comes into effect only after certain procedural conditions have been met. If the warrant is not presented to the service provider, he can hardly be expected to abide by it. The FSB and the court can do with the document whatever they like, but they cannot keep it hidden and apply it to third parties. From our point of view, the FSB's right to store the document does not obviate its obligation to present a warrant to the service provider.