Banning mobile phones in the army. The real reasons for the ban on smartphones in the Russian army

When collecting a conscript for service, parents ask: is it allowed to use a mobile phone in the army? A mobile device has become a commonplace and daily routine of our life, sometimes it may seem that without it we are like no hands. But the army has its own laws, which are known with accuracy only by those who have already served or are well aware of Russian legislation.

Not everyone has such knowledge, so we will help you figure out whether it is worth taking a phone with you to the army at all or is it a useless exercise, it is better to leave it at home.

Should I take my phone to the army

The telephone is the only means of communication for the conscript with his home, family and relatives, so, of course, you need to take it. In the army in 2019, it is allowed to use a cell phone, but you should remember the basic rules, in case of violation of which the soldier will have to answer to the command to the fullest extent of the army laws:

1. The order of the Minister of Defense, registered in 2009, determines that in the Russian army you can use the telephone only on certain days and hours, which is set by the leadership of a particular military unit.
2. You can also have a phone in 2019 in your personal time, that is, you will have to forget about it when serving in a daily dress. The same goes for the garrison.
3. To better navigate the rules, find and download the application "Army and Law" to your smartphone, before going into the draft, study it from A to Z, this will help to avoid many punishments for misconduct. V mobile program you can also ask a lawyer a question if a disputable situation suddenly arises, but it is better not to bring it up to this.

You must notify your family members about these rules of army life, in force for conscripts in 2019, explain that the army is not a walk-through yard, where you can afford to do whatever you want. This is your job for the next 12 months, moreover, work according to a clearly established schedule, now they decide for you when to get up in the morning and when to go to bed.

In fact, you cannot fully manage your life for a whole year, so you will have to forget about talking on the phone for a long time and when your parents or your girlfriend need it.

Which phone is better to take to the army

So, we have already found out that it is not only possible to take a phone to a draftee, but even necessary, but to use it - with restrictions. Some servicemen take 2 devices with them at once, one is handed over to the person in charge, and the second is hidden in the pocket of the uniform, but in part such experiments are not approved.

Think how much you need a mobile phone - during study and training, physical and strength exercises for endurance, the mobile phone can fall out and break, then you will definitely not be good, and the device cannot be returned, it is useless.

That is why the former soldiers do not recommend to "earn" themselves consciously outfits and punishments out of turn, you are called to the army to learn something, and not to wash floors or clean sacks of potatoes. New-fashioned smartphones are also useless - they break down quickly, even one blow can provoke the failure of some functions, which will never happen with a simple push-button device.

Choose a cheap, hiked, but reliable mobile device that no soldier will covet, and that you don't mind replacing in the event of a sudden breakdown. This authorized telephone should be deposited with the responsible person, once a week it will be given out to call relatives. The soldier does not need the apparatus for any other purpose.

It so happens that the command is not too strict about the presence of a second phone, so sometimes you can ask your parents to bring a second mobile to the meeting, but only if you carefully study the daily routine and the rules in force in the military unit.

Which phones can not be worn on the territory of a military unit

In order to avoid reprimand and dress, the soldier needs to abandon cellular communication devices of the GSM format. For ease of use, give preference to a simple model with a microUSB power connector - this is a single standard for charging absolutely all mobile phones; it can be used to charge almost all gadgets, tablets, and phones.

There are many cases when a soldier lost a personalized cord to a smartphone and could no longer simply charge it even with the help of a friend's charger. The standard power connector is most often built into LG, Nokia and Alcatel phone models.

If you want to relax after watching an interesting movie with your comrades in the evening, ask your relatives to download a couple of videos to your smartphone, but do not abuse the entertainment and hide modern apparatus somewhere far away from prying eyes - in the army, only you are responsible for the safety of valuable things, no one is insured against theft.

How to arrange your leisure time in the army

In the service, the soldier will definitely not be bored, because the day is scheduled literally by the minute, the daily routine is quite tough, getting up early, certain responsibilities, for example, in the kitchen, training and lights out.

In the absence of a cool phone, you can diversify your leisure time with the following activities:

1. Go in for sports - offer to build a sports corner, take the initiative and take part in this important process.

You can make not only barbells and weights, but also full-fledged simulators, for which the team will only say "thank you". There is an opinion that among the "grandfathers" who will soon leave for demobilization, it is customary to have fun, getting drunk, but here the owner is already a master, no one will pour alcohol into the conscript by force. Everyone chooses for himself what he likes.

1. Arrange concerts for the holidays with the participation of soldiers, thus earning additional advantages from the command in your address, and maybe even a leave of absence home.

Image copyright Dmitry Feoktistov / TASS Image caption Smartphones with cameras may soon be banned for the Russian military

The Russian Defense Ministry may impose restrictions on the use of smartphones for military personnel in the fight against information leaks, the Kommersant newspaper writes. Experts interviewed by the BBC question the effectiveness of this measure.

According to Kommersant, instead of smartphones with geolocation and a camera, servicemen can be offered to use the simplest models of push-button mobile phones.

According to the publication, Lieutenant General of the Russian General Staff Yuri Kuznetsov made a list of mobile devices approved for use in units of the Ministry of Defense.

The list includes 11 inexpensive push-button devices costing from 688 to 2313 rubles. All of them have the function of sending SMS, a built-in alarm clock, a calculator and a calendar, but they do not have GPS / GLONASS navigation, as well as there is no built-in photo or video camera.

The Ministry of Defense hopes that such a measure will help fight information leaks - photographs and videos taken by military personnel, as well as their posts on social networks and geotags, are increasingly appearing in journalistic publications and in the materials of investigative groups.

The BBC Russian service asked experts how expedient it is to introduce such restrictions and whether anything will change if they are adopted.

Ruslan Leviev, founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team project

I think that the soldiers will continue to act as it was before: give one phone to the chief for safekeeping, hide the other under the pillow, and update their social networks from him.

There are infinitely many such instructions, and in our memory since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, this kind of initiative has been put forward for the fourth or fifth time.

But the main thing is not instructions (according to the law, soldiers are already prohibited from publishing information about army service, since they are a state secret), but control. Controlling a huge army is hard.

But in the much smaller Wagner group, it is much easier to exercise such control. Therefore, we have noticed many times that as soon as a person signs a contract with PMC Wagner, immediately all his online activity completely stops.

So as regards the Russian servicemen, I think this will in no way affect our work.

Denis Mokrushin, blogger, military observer

It is possible to give up [the use of smartphones], but how will all this be controlled? Now, for example, and so the military is forbidden to use mobile phones on the territory of the unit.

But nevertheless, at least officers and contractors wear them without hindrance. Because otherwise it is difficult to keep in touch with each other. If the commander wants to assign a task to a subordinate, and he is not next to him, then he simply calls him on the phone.

Officially, this is prohibited, but in fact, the ban only applies to conscripts who actually hand over their phones. But, again, they can rent one phone, and have a second for communication. From there they will go to Vkontakte and other social networks.

BBC: And when are soldiers given telephones in units?

D.M .: For example, on certain time in the evening, when all classes are over. It depends on the unit, on the mode of its secrecy. Somewhere it can only be on weekends, also at a certain time. They are necessarily allowed to make calls to their relatives, but this is necessarily regulated in each specific unit by the decision of the commander.

And if participation in hostilities is possible, then they may generally demand to hand over all the phones.

For example, servicemen sent to Syria do not hand over all their phones, but they are prohibited from having smartphones, laptops, smart watches, fitness trackers and the like. It is clear that this can be carried out illegally, but officially it is prohibited.

Forbidden connection

The fight against mobile devices in the Russian army began in the mid-2000s. In October 2005, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov approved “ Instruction on secrecy in the Armed Forces", Which completely prohibited the use of cell phones in units and headquarters. Four years later, under pressure from the public, the rules for the circulation of mobile phones in the army were liberalized.

In December 2009, the troops received instructions from the Minister of Defense No. 205/2/862, which lifted the ban on the use of telephones, albeit with major reservations. Conscripts could use cellular communication only in designated areas and only on weekends. The rest of the time the pipes were kept in the unit commander's safe. Officers and contractors were categorically forbidden to carry and store mobile phones in office premises, where "issues containing information constituting state secrets are discussed."

According to experts, the next round of the fight against gadgets in the army is associated with the growth of their espionage capabilities. Previously, mobile devices were viewed as a potential means of unauthorized photography, audio and video recording. Across modern smartphones a potential adversary may already receive classified information of a strategic nature, and without the knowledge of their owners.

In secret to the whole world

“All modern smartphones are equipped with modules of satellite navigation systems,” a source in the Ministry of Defense, who wished to remain incognito, told RIA Novosti. - If someone can get access to this data, he will find out information about the deployment of units, their movements, the intensity of combat training. And on the scale of all the Armed Forces. "

Remote hacking of mobile devices is not some super difficult task for our Western partners. In 2015, fugitive American agent Edward Snowden told the BBC that the US National Security Agency and British Center government communications have developed programs for hacking smartphones that allow you to spy on their owners. For example, the Tracker Smurf program locates the device with high accuracy. A year earlier, Russian media reported an unspoken ban on the use of the iPhone for military personnel. The Department of Defense feared that Apple could leak the coordinates of gadgets to the Pentagon.

One of the reasons for the ban on smartphones could be the desire of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense to limit the activity of soldiers on social networks, which have long become a channel of information leakage. The location of units and subunits can be found by geotagging photos posted by soldiers on their personal pages. It is known that at the height of the war in Donbass, Ukrainian "volunteers" with the help of social networks very effectively tracked the movement of Russian troops near the border. Analysis personal pages military personnel, apparently, is being conducted at a higher level. In August 2017, the Pentagon announced the creation of a monitoring service for social networks in Russian, English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese, as well as in the dialects common in China.

How are they?

At the same time, the US military department has been trying to impose discipline in the ranks of its users of social networks for more than 10 years. In 2007, in Iraq, American aviation lost four AH-64 Apache helicopters in one day - the cars burned up on the ground during a mortar attack. They found guilty American fighters, who posted selfies on Facebook in front of cars the day before the attack. The militants, as reported in the Pentagon, found geotags with GPS coordinates of the shooting in the metadata of the photo and struck an accurate strike. Soon, the United States Army Command issued a cheat sheet with six basic rules of conduct on social media for soldiers in the war zone and their families (“6 Social media Considerations for Deployed Soldiers and Their Families "). Similar manuals have been published for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

An impressive part of the instructions is devoted to services with geotagging, which, according to the authors of the manual, "can lead the enemy." The command strongly recommends that soldiers turn off GPS navigation on smartphones. Fighters are encouraged to be extremely selective in online communications. There are known cases when the Taliban “glued” to the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan under the guise of pretty girls as friends on Facebook. "You only add as friends those you know in real life," read the army instructions. It is interesting that at the beginning of the year, manuals with similar instructions appeared in the Russian Army.

ODON, Moscow region, Balashikha, military unit 6771 call 2-14
I took a push-button with me Samsung phone GT-E1200 (ideal, it cost 600 rubles, keeps a charge for a day if you do not turn it off, if you turn it off and use it once a week, then about a month), at that time I had an iphone 4, but I did not dare to take it. In the army, everyone had telephones, but they were in the company commander's safe, and the deputy company commander for work with personnel (political officer) and his clerk were in charge of accounting and issuing the telephone at weekends. Each phone and charger always had a “badge” with a personal number. This is a very clever mechanism of influencing a soldier, since a call to my family was very important for me, and telephones, those who somehow did not behave in good faith, were not given it to them. And the time of issue strongly depended on the mood of the political officer. They could have issued either for the whole day or for half an hour, so everything was silk. As for how to use the phone, everyone did not care deeply, you could take pictures, listen to music, play, and so on. I had a statutory part, so only my grandfathers had an illegal phone number and only those who regularly went on guard. On the guard, everyone, including myself, spoke on the phone at the post, in the winter I put it in my hat and onward. If they are caught, then no one will nail with a nail, they can declare a penalty and simply put them in the safe. It all depends on where to serve. In the Army, telephones are a whole business, it was possible to order a certain phone model from the people who were engaged in this, the telephones were, of course, they were stolen from safes and someone was in the share. I remember you could buy Htc one for 7k. This concerned large units, like a regiment (I served in a detachment battalion) and where there were a lot of non-Russians, they were all badly worn out and they all had telephones.
After 7 months, I was transferred to an autotransport on the Volga Siber, I drove the colonel and, of course, I had to have a phone (otherwise, how to keep in touch with the head of the car and the company command). I took my “tapik” from the safe and they brought it to me in my iPhone, actually I charged them in the car through the cigarette lighter, and no one shook us, since absolutely all drivers had phones. From life hacks, I advise you to take a regular file for paper and keep both the phone and the charger there, since everything in the safe is in a mess and until everyone finds his own there, a lot of time passes. I also strongly advise you to find some kind of compact tee, because there were real cuttings for the outlet.
By the way, there was a story when the foreman broke his phone and was looking for a temporary replacement, I naively gave him an iPhone and he walked with him for a month, in the end he gave it away with a crack protective glass and crack charging block and for another week I could not unlock it because he himself forgot the password that he set, besides, he took a picture of himself and his wife there, probably so that I could admire.
Squeeze: I advise you to take a cheap phone, which is not a pity, as in the text, but when you “get lost” and become a senior conscript or a junior command staff, you can order a smartphone from home. As for cameras and so on, it depends on the place, maybe in closed cities or secret facilities there with this strony, but our officers, special young lieutenants, did not crawl out of iPhones from the word at all. If there is a great need to call, the political officer always went to a meeting even when it was not supposed to, we are all people, even officers.

As it became known to Kommersant, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is considering the option of limiting the operation of modern means cellular communication in the central office, command and control bodies and troops (up to subunits). Instead of smartphones, all military personnel - including those at the top - were asked to use the most simple models push-button telephones, which do not have the function of photo and video shooting and do not track geolocation, but they are able to send SMS and are equipped with a built-in flashlight. According to Kommersant's information, the administration of the department decided in this way to deal with information leaks, including in the media. The new measures may take effect as early as March 1.

About innovations in use personal funds cellular communications in the armed forces "Kommersant" was told by two sources close to the General Staff of the RF Armed Forces, and also confirmed by an interlocutor in the leadership of the department. According to one of them, over the past months, the issue has been worked out jointly with the special services responsible for protecting state secrets. And recently, the chief of the eighth department of the General Staff of the RF Armed Forces (responsible for ensuring information security, is engaged in encryption), Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov has compiled a list of mobile devices "allowed for use" in central and military command and control bodies, units of the RF Ministry of Defense, formations, military units and organizations of the RF Armed Forces.

The list includes only 11 phone models of four different manufacturers(Nokia, TeXet, Alcatel and Samsung). These are the simplest push-button devices costing from 688 (for the Alcatel One Touch 1020D handset) to 2,313 rubles. (for the "clamshell" Samsung GT-E1272). They meet several main requirements: they use the GSM 900/1800 standards (a number of models are 900/1800/1900), are equipped with a polycarbonate cover, have an SMS sending function, a built-in alarm clock, a calculator, a calendar, a headphone jack, and some also have a flashlight or even a compartment for a second SIM card. The phone models recommended by the General Staff of the RF Armed Forces do not have GPS / GLONASS navigation, as well as there is no built-in photo or video camera.

Military sources of Kommersant explain the innovation, which should take effect as early as March 1, by "considerations of secrecy." In recent years, the department has experienced many problems due to information leaks: for example, during the operation to annex Crimea to Russia in 2014, its participants took memorable photographs at the former facilities of the Ukrainian armed forces, which were then leaked onto the Internet and used in the West to make allegations of "Russian aggression". Photographs taken by Russian citizens on the territory of southeastern Ukraine during battles with the regular army served as the basis for accusations against the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

For the last time, the department was concerned about the fact of the publication on social networks of photographs taken at the Khmeimim airbase in Syria after a mortar attack on militants: serious damage to equipment was visible in the photographs distributed on the network, which were filmed by a smartphone by one of the servicemen.

In addition, according to Kommersant's information, the military is hoping that the abandonment of smartphones will help get rid of unauthorized entry of documents (including those labeled "For official use") in the media.

Note that this restrictive measure fits into the policy of working with military personnel pursued by the Ministry of Defense. So, on February 13, the Izvestia newspaper, with reference to the rules for using the Internet, developed by the department at the end of 2017, reported that military personnel and civilian employees of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation were advised to abandon the use of social networks... In the future, the Ministry of Defense intends to amend the laws that will make them mandatory. True, according to several employees of the central office of the department, it is easy to get around these rules: it is enough to create an account under a fictitious name.

With telephones, the situation is more complicated, says one of Kommersant's interlocutors: many employees of the department, including those related to the management, are accustomed to using multifunctional devices that allow installing instant messengers and making calls over the Internet, and “no one is going to give up their accessories”. But even this prohibition can be bypassed simply, says an officer of one of the units of the Ministry of Defense: “A simple" dialer "is bought in addition, which you always carry with you and, if necessary, you can present to your superiors. A normal phone in silent mode remains in your pocket. "

Kommersant sent a request to the Department of Information and Mass Communications with a request to comment on the department's plans.