A police chief in Moscow has been ousted over fears that he exposed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motorcade routes to prying U.S. eyes, according to Russian and British reports.
“By a presidential decree, the head of the Moscow State Traffic Safety Inspectorate, Police Colonel Yuri Droganov, was dismissed from his post,” a Russian law enforcement source revealed, according to a Russia-based outlet.
The ouster is attributed to the police chief’s use of WhatsApp to coordinate law enforcement operations to clear streets for Putin’s motorcade and other official delegations driving through the capital city. The Kremlin’s misgivings about the encrypted app support the suspicion that the use of the platform “put at risk the security of the leadership of the Russian Federation,” according to a whistleblower.
“The headquarters of the WhatsApp company are in the United States; its methods of encryption and security on sending messages are unknown,” former Moscow police Maj. Vasili Vetitnev wrote in a complaint, according to British media. “It is also possible to make a screenshot and the information will be available to third parties.”
WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging platform, is known for its end-to-end encryption, which is supposed to guard the messages from being read by unauthorized people. Yet the platform has attracted suspicion in recent years — due to threats from other government hackers, at least. In Ukraine, for instance, one of Kyiv’s top security officials warned a pair of U.S. diplomats “that there were now ways, thanks to Israeli code writers, of cracking the alleged encryption of text messages on WhatsApp,” a senior State Department official revealed during the impeachment depositions.
“Confirming Colonel [Yuri] Droganov’s departure, Moscow’s traffic police said that Mr Putin had formally relieved the 59-year-old of his post in November after he resigned because he had reached pension age,” the Times in London noted.
