Scott’s answer to an email from a Grid Dynamics employee

by Scott Humor

After my research Grid Dynamics connects wars in Ukraine and Syria with Soros’ Open Russia, Sobchak and snipers in Saratov was published, I received a reply from one of the company’s employees.

We are withholding the name and occupation of the commentator. I can only say that it’s an employee, who has worked for the company for several years.

————————————————————————————————–

I’m working at GD in Saratov and most of the article looks like paid information war against the company.

1. The article has a link on google play application. This app is developed by a very good man for the good purpose. But the author sais: “As a Russian, I wouldn’t want my children to learn anything from a company that employs Ukrainian nationalists who worked providing money and services for the death battalions in Ukraine.”. It sounds very negative to this app without real reason. This app is developed by a good man in his own free time.
2. About nationalists: the company hires good specialists. It’s a choice of employees how to spend money (if it’s not against the law). The company can’t and will not fire people based on how they spend money (it’s just my opinion). Moreover, it’s not legal in our countries to fire people in this way. The policy of the company is absolutely not related to conflicts in Ukraine. Moreover, Russians and Ukrainians are working together in the same teams. The company is interested in peace between our countries because this conflict makes huge business risks for the company. And about her talks about Russian in Ukraine: I agree, it sounds strange to live in a country and dislike the county. She has a right to think so. It’s a freedom like in US. She loves her country and that’s absolutely normal. But author by this says something bad about the company. That’s a dirty manipulation. Also it’s her right to support army of her country. I’m wondering if you will be against your army in your country.
3. Yes, GD engineers (to be honest it was a lot of engineers of biggest IT companies in Saratov)  organized YouCon in Saratov as biggest IT conference. It’s a volunteer work to increase people interest to Informational technologies. That’s a very good idea and event, but author demonstrated volunteers as evil and said bad things about the conference. I’m shocked and really disappointed because of that.
4. “According to the company’s vKontakte account in December 2017 for a company’s retreat they stayed in Tzargrad hotel outside of Saratov, where they took a sniper training course.”. Again, if someone likes shooting, it’s not a reason to relate company to guns. Many Russians and Ukrainians like shooting as a lot of people in US. For some reason, author connects this to the Company. That absolutely not right. That’s dishonest. I’m sure a lot of employees at Google, Amazon and so on like shooting.
5. “In fall of 2017, Anastasia Moskaleva was appointed a regional coordinator for the Khodorkovsky”. That’s absolutely her right and freedom. That’s not a policy of the Company.  For example, personally, I support Putin in my mind and that’s also is not the Company policy.
6. Augmented Reality. I watched this presentation (before it became a blog). Here’s how it was: One developer said “Hey, guys, I’m found very interesting topic, let me share my knowledge about the augmented reality.” And it was interesting for other engineers. And I’m shocked how the author used this to blame the Company in revolutions in countries! People, are you still in your mind? Wake up.
7. The author writes “The SBU specialists found that the client part of the DarkTrack hacking software, after installation, was connecting to server hardware (command&control servers) with Russian IP-addresses. In fact, the Russian hackers, controlled by the Kremlin…”. It’s very popular statement to blame Russia in public mass media, but in fact, this works only for people who are not aware of the technologies. Personally you spend 15 mins and break the myth. Any man, even student, can take 5$ and buy a server in Amazon AWS or Google Could or digitalocean in a lot of countries: in USA, Europ, Australia and so on.  And host there the service of the trojan control. In IT it very very easy to buy and use another IP  address in almost any country to hide your own. Any hacked server can be used to host the Trojan control service. Even any host infected by this trojan. If Kremlin even will want to perform a cyber attack, it will never be so easy to trace source. The analysis mentioned in the article can be done even by a schoolboy by looking at source address and using a whois service. That’s not how Russian IT specialists work.

A have a lot of such points. That article looks like a paid black PR and teeming with manipulation of facts. It’s very very sadly, undeservedly and dishonest.

—————————————————————————————————-

The following is my response.

Thank you for your comments and for your interest in my article.

First of all, let me explain that I am not getting paid for my articles published by thesaker.is. Furthermore, my investigative articles are not products of assignments, but a result of concern about the wellbeing of my country and my people.

The first time I heard about Grid Dynamics was in September of 2015, when one of the company’s engineers, Alexander Trekov, was brutally murdered on his way from work.

For the past twenty-five years, Russia’s science has been suffering from an ongoing and sustained war on scientists. In the 1990s, 800 science research institutions were closed, and thousands of scientists were left with no jobs and no community. By some estimates, about 800,000 people with science degrees left the country in the last quarter of century.

Currently, several dozens of Russian Academy of Science members live and work in the West. Those scientists who refused to leave were threatened and about one hundred were killed in what clearly has been a systematic black op.

Most of the murders have never been solved. Here you can find a compilation of names of murdered scientists and circumstances of their death from 2001 to 2010:

A hunt on Russia’s scientists sheds some light into the past and explains why Stalin kept the country’s best minds under protection, in closed secret research centers. At the time, it was truly the only way to protect them. I don’t think we would have Korolev, Tupolev, and Kalashnikov to work as long and productively as they did if they lived as private citizens who were targets of foreign security services and the followers of Trotsky.

Back to Alexander Trekov, who was noticed as a university student with his groundbreaking research on autonomous vehicles. There were rumors that he was killed because of his work, and the perpetrators were never found, despite of the security cameras footage obtained by the police, which points to a planned professional hit by someone who knew Trekov’s schedule, the Saratov streets he walked home, and the location of security cameras in the area.

The second time the Grid Dynamics company’s name came up was during research for my book “Pokémons in Ukraine.” I was composing profiles of the Blue Team crisis actors, the so called “Ukrainian pro-EU patriots,” and was crosschecking them with the Red Team Crisis actors, the so called “pro-Russia rebels.” The fact is that some crisis actors changed teams and went back and forth, and I was trying to map their movements. On one video of “pro-Russian rebels” a woman managing a staged protest looked exactly like one of the managers of the Help-Army NGO, that assisted the Kiev regime death battalions in 2014.

I checked the backgrounds of some of the people in the video, trying to get evidence that this woman was in Donetsk in the spring of 2014. That’s how I found that another person on the video, Yulia Rudanovska, worked for the Grid Dynamics, and my first thought was, “Wait a minute, isn’t it the same company where a young promising engineer was killed? He was developing technology for driverless cars.”

I am describing my research process in such detail to show you that my article wasn’t an assignment, but something organically grown from my other research. So, again, I don’t get paid for my articles.

The Grid Dynamic largely contributed to the lost of talented software developers and engineers.

Grid Dynamics International, Inc. has filed 109 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 17 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2014 to 2016.

Grid Dynamics International, Inc., Jobs & Salary for Foreign Workers …

I found that the company pays about 100,000 rubles a month to its system engineers in Russia, which is approximately $1750 a months. About $20,000 a year, which is a fraction of what they pay to specialists who agree to relocate to the U.S.

The practice of unequal pay within same company is not just used by the U.S. based companies in Russia, but also across the European Union member states. Per industry insider, the main reason IT people are “defecting” to the US is because they get higher salaries there. For example in Damore’s lawsuit against Google he talks about a 150,000 USD per year in stock option bonus (that doesn’t include his base salary). Some specialists who went to the US confirming it was the case (they still came back, though, mostly because they didn’t like the mentality).

The practice of unequal pay based on a geographic location of an IT specialist is a coercive mechanism to make highly valuable specialists to move to the United States, and also a wealth transfer mechanism, considering that due to being paid less, specialists based in Russia pay less in taxes, and they will have smaller pensions down the road, which in turn places additional pressure on the country’s social security baseline.

What happens when people arrive to the US? I wrote about the Russian programmer Sergey Aleynikov, jailed by Goldman Sachs, here,  here, and here. He was jailed on made up charges merely for wanting to quit Goldman Sachs, and to work for a company that would pay him ten times more. Goldman Sachs pulled some strings and showed him, and all other Russian specialists, that they were slaves who weren’t allowed to quit their owners. Kris Kaspersky or Nikolay Likhachev, a software developer who worked for the US government program of malware detection, and who died reportedly after jumping off a plane, even so no footage of his jump was on airport surveillance cameras, and no other jumpers remembered him to be on a plane in February 2017. We know that the US government kidnaps programmers from Russia and jails them for ridiculous frivolous charges. According to a wife of one of them, he was offered to work for the US government in his professional capacity against Russia in exchange for freedom.

There is a steady flow of information of sudden violent deaths of Russians working in the US or visiting the country. Anton Yelchin, a Hollywood actor, died in an apparent accident in 2016. Anton Kemaev, a father of three children, was killed in Pittsburg in December 2017.  Artem S. Ziberov, a high school student, was killed in June 2017 in Maryland. “Nine months, nine prominent Russians dead,” victoriously declared CNN in August 2017. “Nine high-profile Russians, including several high-profile diplomats, have died over the nine months since the US presidential election on November 8.”

When people managing the US security agencies and military say that they have to kill as many Russians as they can, it’s not an empty threat, but rather their way to reveal their plans.

Add to this a growing civil unrest inside the America’s biggest companies. In short, the companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google are punishing voters for electing Trump by demonetizing their content channels. YouTube did this and Facebook shut down millions of accounts of users, mostly some brilliant individuals, stay at home moms, disabled and retired people, who managed to make a living using those platforms. It has been a devastating hit for many families, and now a wave of backlash is coming. Many people working for those companies are not Trotskists. A Facebook engineer had his house burned down,  after he publicly spoke about infighting in FB between so called “democrats” and the realists, who understand that the company is wreaking havoc in society. Facebook is terrified to have Mark Zuckerberg speak to the Congress.

A Twitter employee brags that sitting behind his keyboard, he can shut the President of America down, to stop him communicating with millions of his constituents and with outside world.  They did this once, but brought back Trump’s tweeter account in ten minutes. Can you imagine this level of hubris, delusion and separation from reality if a Tweeter employee says that the President’s free speech is his hands?

This kind of provocations spells troubles mostly for people who work for those companies. Now imagine to be a specialist from Russia and getting cutup in this shitstorm, considering that both sides, socialists and conservatives, are brainwashed to hate the Russians. Say, you work for Google and your manager is a black woman, who hates you for being white male and double hates you for being Russian who, in her mind, “helped to elect Trump.” She would do anything in her power to turn your life into living hell. She can even mastermind a false flag attack to frame you for some kind of company policy violation, or worse.

Considering the situation, it’s still hard to prevent talented educated people from trying something new and signing up to work for the American companies. They might not even be aware what cesspool they are getting into.

Russia’s IT specialists and engineers are not protected on the international professional labor market. They are forced to negotiate as individuals, with no bargaining power behind them. The government  cannot do this for them. Looking at pictures of talented intelligent Russian children taking part in your latest YouCon, and, in my opinion, being manipulated, used and thrown to the American sharks, makes me worried sick for them.

They need a professional union organization that would negotiate their contacts, with lawyers that would look after their interests and also after the interest of the country that invests so much resources to educate them into specialists who are in high demand worldwide. This organization also should be able to assist young scientists in getting funds to start their own companies.

There is a need to create an IT students union that would do same as a professional union, but in relation to students traveling and visiting schools and conferences in other countries. These two organization, not for profit NGOs, would watch over the specialists who work abroad making sure that they are safe. They should be staffed with people familiar with labor laws in deferent countries, capable of negotiating contracts to get the highest  pay possible, people who have direct contacts with the country’s law enforcement, and with the legal firms abroad  to be used in the worst case scenario. These organizations should have enough funds available to pay for legal defense.

Believe me, it’s much harder to threaten, harass, underpay and mistreat someone who is represented by lawyers from a big organization, then an individual who has no legal support.   

——————-

President Putin said during his meeting with the representatives of the Russia’s liberal media: “after some time any commodity will be digitized and occupy its place on such information digital platforms that it will be impossible to produce or upgrade anything without using information from these platforms. Those who own these platforms will rule the world.”

Now imagine that an IT company whose founders, managers and employees directly and indirectly involved in the regime change business, embeds itself into this unified Eurasian platform via its employees developed codes. All it takes is one or two lines of codes burred inside 1000s pages of script, configured to trigger some catastrophic event when a certain date or conditions are achieved.

Here, I found an illustration of my thesis that .ru emails extensions are being used by the IT specialist physically located in other countries.

This based on an email from the HBGary company, the US government contractor, published by the Wikileaks, and appropriately titled “Holy Shit Dude – MalwareDomainList offers their full db (database) as a free DL (download).”

https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/emailid/56319

From:  Shawn Bracken, the  Principal Research Scientist HBGary, Inc. shawn@hbgary.com To: greg@hbgary.com Date: 2011-01-13 06:56 Subject: Holy Shit Dude – MalwareDomainList offers their full db as a free DL

“58k+ rows of blacklist candidates attached. There is literally 10’s of thousands of great blacklist domains, IP subnets, admin contacts etc to get us started all in this little 8.5mb CSV file. I could even load/use this list in its literal format in about 30 minutes of CSV parser coding if I wanted. (although in actuality I’ll probably have the Master box parse/convert to a native HBG/Razor config format which is what will get distributed to the slave razor apps.) BONUS: They also have an RSS feed you hit that we can have the Master hit that will give us just the hourly/daily updates of whats new. With the help of a few great sources like this our OSINT pimp-hand will be very strong. Thanks for the clue on checking out malwaredomainlist. :P”

Open a file in attachment at https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/emailid/56319

Take a look at what is listed under numbers #6028 and #6029: zeus v1 config file for Zeus Bot. Zbot is a banking Trojan that also goes by the names Zeus, WSNPOEM, NTOS and PRG. Once the Trojan is downloaded onto your computer, it runs in the background recording every keystroke your computer makes. Take a look at item called “Blade2009” with email www2@open.by.

An email is based in Belarus, but an IP: 92.60.176.41is owned by a Ukrainian company wnet.ua, located in Odessa.

Operating from the territory of Ukraine.

If you search the file with a keyword “.ru” you will find out that many of the hackers operating with .ru mail extension were, actually, operating from UA (Ukraine)and US (the United States.)

Another example, “Anton Nikiforov” (same@bz3.ru) items #56341, 56342, 56343, 56344 operated from the US, under #56350 and further, the same ID hacker appeared to be operating from alternately China and Ukraine. Say, this is a Pentagon contractor with employees based on the US military bases around the world, or an international company with subcontractors located in deferent locations.

I am bringing this subject again and again, because while Washington is attacking and accusing Russia in hacking activities and IMPOSING ECONOMIC SANCTIONS on our country, not one Russian software developer stood up and said  “Wait a minute, this is hurting us, this is hurting our country, this is very troubling, we want to use our expertise to get to the bottom of it.” NOT ONE OF THEM said “lets’ get together, let’s contribute a couple of days each and lets prove that Washington is an evil bullshitter and a liar. Let’s stand for our country!” Not one of them have done this. They are all hiding under a leaf and making noises about “freedom” of our enemies to attack us.

I am not blaming you personally, I just want to know why Russia based IT companies and hugely successful game developers that accumulated tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise have not stood up to defend country that provides them knowledge and expertise that wouldn’t exist without Russian culture, education, and people.

—————————————————————————————————

Concerning matters of free speech

Different countries have different, and sometimes opposite understanding what the “freedom of speech” encompasses. In Germany, for example, any criticism of the state of Israel is considered to be a hateful speech and is punished by incarceration.

In 2017, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas championed the measure that fines  Facebook, Twitter and other outlets up to $53 million (50 million euros) if they failed to remove hate speech and other forms of illegal content, this is known as the German Hate Speech Laws and it dictates for the social media users to be a subject to a range of punishments for posting material, including a prison sentence of up to five years for what “may” amount to threats, hate speech, defamation, or incitement to commit a crime, among other offenses.

Britain has something similar called the Public Order Act under which people being arrested and jailed on merely “suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred.”

In my view, the United State and Russia have the most freedom of speech of all countries. Although, in case of the MSM, the freedom of speech is being severally reduced by actions of the privately owned social media platforms. They also report directly to the U.S. secret services, as an undercover video appears to show Twitter security engineer saying that Twitter keeps all deleted direct messages and Tweets in case they need to hand them over to the government at a later date.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/951310420224167936

Granted all of the above, you have to understand that in, so called, Western countries, attacks on people for having a different ethnic identity is a hate speech.

Kseniya Sobchak once notoriously stated that “Russians are genetic waste.” Her other equally notorious statement she made during her interview to a reporter of the Novaya Gazeta Alexander Nikonov in 2005. She said, “I love Jews, because all Russians are cattle.”

I don’t know about you, but I am a Russian, and  I absolutely disagree with her notion.  In addition, this kind of racist remarks about Russians is not a “free speech.” It’s a hate speech.

————————————————————————————————–

Concerning so called “non-systemic opposition” and foreign entities including the Grid Dynamics interference in Russia’s presidential election

Here, on thesaker.is we have accumulated a large body of research on the “color revolution” methods and evidence that so called “the fifth column” and “non-systemic opposition” to the Russian state are in fact agents of the foreign governments, military and secret services. We published our researches into use of false flag attacks and snipers. If you don’t trust our opinions, you can simply read the diplomatic dispatches demonstrating how the “liberal non-systemic opposition” in Russia and Belarus directly linked to the United State government.

·        A diplomatic dispatch the US Ambassador met with Belarusian pro-democracy activists living in exile in Estonia, filed on September 2007.

·        In 1996-1997, Milinkevich represented the Belarusian Soros Foundation in Grodno.

·        OPPOSITION CHOOSES SINGLE CANDIDATE, 2005 October 3

·        Belarus opposition meeting with the US senators

In my article on the Grid Dynamics I described the history and ownership of the company. There is no doubt that it’s an U.S. based company that recently was acquired by a Chinese entity, which makes this company being a foreign company.

According to Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Russian government haven been seeking a reciprocal non-interference with the U.S. in each other’s internal affairs within the framework of the law for nearly a century. Among examples of such interference of so called Western states are “voice their opinions, criticizing everything linked with the elections, from legislation to procedural issues,” by the illegal economic and political sanctions and restrictions.

“In late December, Putin said foreign security agencies are “doing all they can to ramp up their level of activity in Russia,” targeting the country’s social and political life. A month before that, the president warned that “in response to our alleged interference in their election, [the Americans] want to create problems with the presidential vote in Russia.”

According to unnamed diplomatic sources, ” Ukrainian radical organizations will try “with double vigor to disrupt the polling” for citizens of Russia, who currently resign in Ukraine, to vote at the Presidential elections in Russia

A memorandum dedicated to Washington’s long-standing and systemic aspirations to influence the developments in Russia in its own interests was handed over to US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman on December 21, 2017.

As I wrote in my article, the YouCon conference that had gathered 1200 students from all over the country was used as a platform to arrange meetings with a representative of Soros/ Khodorkovsky/Sobchak.

The Grid Dynamics is a foreign entity that is actively interfering into the Russian presidential election.

The irony of it all seems to be lost on managers and employees of the GD. You are a foreign company. You arranged meeting between 1200 Russian college students and a director of non-systemic opposition headquarter that serves interests of foreign entities, like notorious George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, the Open Russia, a anti-Russian foreign based organization founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Sobchak, a non-systemic anti-Russia personality, whose hate speech I quoted above.

I think there is a way for the company to remedy the situation.

First,  contact the colleges and universities that sent their students to the Grid Dynamic’s YouCon Conference, and ask their rectors and deans, if this is their school’s policies to allow their students to be subjected to political brainwashing during to what essentially should be an educational event.

Second, contact parents of 1200 students who were present at the conference. Invite those parents for a video conference and asked them, if they gave their permission to their children to be subjected to a brainwashing by a representative of people and organizations who are known around the world as vicious enemies of Russia.

Third, post on your media platforms a disclaimer stating that as an international company you are not allowed by the law to interfere in the Russian presidential election and the Grid Dynamic, being an international American based company, by law, is not allowed to conduct any political activities and to endorse any of the candidates.

——————————————————————————————–

Concerning some Grid Dynamics employees, who took part in the war against civilian population of Donbass.

The claims these people make that they were fighting in an “ATO” (Anti-Terror Operation) have just been rejected by the Ukrainian government.

On January 16, 2018 the Parliament of Ukraine, Rada, has refused to recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk republics as the “terrorist organizations.”

We, at thesaker.is, have generated a huge body of work dedicated to the Ukrainian war. In 2015-2016 we had daily and weekly SITREP updates, analytics, opinions, and translations of Russia’s experts, like Ruslan Hubiev. and Rostislav Ishchenko. We have posted numerous videos about this war, and statements of President Putin and other officials.

Some of my articles concerning the matter

• Russia vs. ECHR: The Rise and Fall of the European Courts
• Kiev Junta’s victims sue Ukraine for hundreds of millions in ECHR
• Behind Ukraine vs. Russia case in the UN International Court icj-cij
• STAND for Ukraine Act H.R. 5094 and its authors
• Breaking news regarding armed conflict in Ukraine

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced that they have initiated a criminal investigation of war crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

 In SK press release as following:

The SK initiated the criminal investigation of the Ukraine armed forces and law enforcement involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity

The SK of Russian Federation initiated criminal cases involving the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare based on previously unknown facts of the Ukrainian military shelling of civilians.

RT has published a summary of the SK statement and the interviews of the attorneys and legal experts involved in this investigation.

“In practice, the armed forces servicemen can easily define what constitutes a “knowingly criminal command,” said the expert of Association of military political scientists, head of the Department of political science and sociology of Plekhanov Russian University of Economics professor Andrey Koshkin: “The criminal command is the use of regular troops against the civilian population. I suspect that this fact lies at the basis of this wording.  It’s a war crime to destroy the civilian population on the orders of the superiors.”

Other criminal cases initiated by the Russia’s Investigative Committee against persons, and official entities in Ukraine committing crimes involving use of prohibited means and methods of warfare.

==================================================================================

I also want to add that while GD itself is not guilty of anything, it is astonishing how many people who might be guilty of something seem to like gathering at GD. Keep in mind, that when you work with the enemies of Russia you should not be surprised that you look bad in the eyes of Russia’s friends.

The GD might want to work on its public image and fire the russophobes. It will help, also, to open a branch in Donetsk and another in Simferopol and hire some folks from Donbass.

etc.,

etc.

—

Kind regards,

Scott Humor

Director of Research and Development

author of The enemy of the State

Follow me on twitter

In case you have forgotten what happened in Ukraine,

this book should refresh your memory with the incredibly precise and humorous

chronicles: ANTHOLOGY OF RUSSIAN HUMOR: FROM MAIDAN TO TRUMP