Enlarge (credit: Presidential Press and Information Office)

Russia’s intelligence agency the FSB, successor to the KGB, has posted a notice on its website claiming that it now has the ability to collect crypto keys for Internet services that use encryption. This meets a two-week deadline given by Vladimir Putin to the FSB to develop such a capability. However, no details have been provided of how the FSB is able to do this.

The FSB’s announcement follows the passage of Russia’s wide-ranging surveillance law, which calls for metadata and content to be stored for six months, plus access to encrypted services, as Ars reported back in June.

The new capability seems to go even further, since the FSB notice (in Russian) speaks of obtaining the “information necessary for decoding the electronic messaging received, sent, delivered, and (or) processed by users of the ‘Internet’ network.”