Robocalls happened a modern scourge, a destroyer of focus, a nuisance that somehow cannot be eradicated. But perhaps they can at least be reassigned to strike a very small and somewhat absurd blow against the Russian government’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Today, a group of international hacktivists launched a website, WasteRussianTime.today, designed to combine prank calls and robocalls into an automated telephone harassment weapon aimed at the Russian state. Visit the site, click a button, and it will cycle through a leaked list of Russian government, military and intelligence phone numbers to connect two random Russian officials – and let the site visitor listen in silence while those officials waste their time , trying to understand why they are talking to each other and who initiated the conversation.
“We hope there will be confusion, that they will get annoyed, and that these may even be interesting calls for people who speak Russian to listen to,” says one of the site’s creators, who goes by the name Shera. The group of artists, activists and programmers behind the site, according to Shera, is called Scheherazade’s Clouded Dreams. “This war started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Putin’s circle of power, and that’s who we want to annoy and disturb.”
Since Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, hacktivists working independently and even aligned with the Ukrainian government have waged an unprecedented campaign of hacking operations targeting Russian organizations, some of which have resulted in the theft and leakage of hundreds of gigabytes of emails belonging to Russians and other private information. The Ukrainian government itself at one point released a list of what it said were the names and contact details of 620 Russian intelligence agents.
Now, by sifting through that pile of leaked information, extracting phone numbers from emails and combining the results with those found in other public sources, the creators of WasteRussianTime.today say they’ve collected more than 5,000 Russian government phone numbers, both landlines and cellphones, including members of Russia’s military police, officials of its parliament, known as the Duma, and even Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB—all of whom are now targets of his automated robo-dial campaign.
WasteRussianTime.today is designed to work by starting a VoIP conversation, automatically dialing 40 of the leaked phone numbers, and joining the user in a three-way conversation with the first two phones of Russian officials that connect. The site’s creators say they decided not to allow site visitors to actually speak during the calls, for fear they might say something that could identify them and put them at risk. So instead, the site functions as a kind of performance art installation, allowing visitors to silently observe and enjoy his spam calls. “Join Civilian Intervention Against War,” reads a message on the site. “If you’re on the phone, you can’t drop bombs or coordinate soldiers.”
