Bruce Schneier is a public-interest technologist. He’s been writing about security issues for more than 20 years, and he’s a Special Advisor to IBM Security, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a board member of Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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A couple of quite similar stories caught my

eye in the past while.

The first was about a German MP

called Markus Frohnmaier. He was elected to the Bundestag, the German

parliament for the far-right AfD party in 2017.

A consortium of journalists from the BBC, German

news magazine Der Spiegel, and TV station ZDF and the Italian La Repubblica

newspaper got a leaked email from Petr Premyak, a former Russian spy who is

also a former member of the Russian parliament. The email, which Premyak

confirmed is genuine, but says he didn’t draft, was sent a couple of months

before Frohnmaier was elected.

It contains a document assessing the state

of public opinion in Germany and analyzing how to influence it in favor of

Russia.

It also refers to Markus Frohnmaier. Frohnmaier,

for a bit of background is quite young, only 28 now; he was 26 when he was

elected to parliament.  He has very frequently

spoken against the EU sanctions on Russia imposed after the invasion of areas

of Ukraine; he has also made trips to Crimea, the Ukrainian territory illegally

annexed by Russia in 2014, and to areas of eastern Ukraine controlled by

pro-Russian separatists and Russian special forces.

The leaked document says that Frohnmaier is

– quote “our own absolutely controlled” politician, and it goes on to predict –

rightly as it turned out – that he had a good chance of getting elected, and

discusses how Russian money could be used to him get elected.

The second

story is about Austria’s FPÖ party. They’re one of the most successful

far-right parties in Europe; they are in coalition government with that

country’s conservative party. Or they were, until a secretly-recorded video of Heinz-Chris...