In an official blog post on Monday, Senior Vice President and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said that the company was disturbed at news that its own lawyers have possibly been engaged in colluding with the Russian authorities to suppress activists and journalists deemed undesirable by the state. In particular, an article by the New York Times cited a raid on the Baikal Environmental Wave, during which Russian police confiscated a dozen computers under the premise that the group was using stolen Microsoft software:

After the raid, the group reached out to Microsoft’s Moscow office, seeking help in defending itself.

Baikal Wave asked Microsoft to confirm that its software was legal, but the company would not, angering the environmentalists. And Microsoft’s local lawyer in Siberia offered testimony to the police in the case on the value of the software that was said to have been stolen.

Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, said Smith, Microsoft has chosen to err on the side of caution and provide a free blanket software license to all non-governmental organizations in Russia. The license doesn’t even require an application, so all organizations are automatically covered.

Microsoft had previously, in 2008, denied knowledge of practices by the Russian authorities of harassing NGOs and journalists and using the fight against piracy as an excuse. Theoretically, the new blanket license should make it harder for Russian law enforcement to wantonly confiscate computers from advocacy organizations.

Ironically, reports on Tuesday also surfaced that a series of Russian human rights organizations have received letters from regional prosecutors demanding documentation about the groups’ financial and organizational activities. As Elena Panfilova of Transparency International’s Russia branch told Ekho Moskvy radio, the affected organizations include the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights, the electoral watchdog Golos, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Transparency International itself. Why the groups are being examined was unclear, said Panfilova.

In a press release issued on Monday, ecologists at the Baikal Environmental Wave expressed concern that police officers had been visiting the homes and places of work of members of the organization. Among those officers were agents from the notoriously brutal Center for Extremism Prevention, commonly known as Center “E” and accused by Amnesty International of torturing detainees.

Over the course of “discussion” with ecologists’ relatives, says the statement, officers made disparaging remarks about the Baikal Environmental Wave and co-leader Marina Rikhvanova.

Rikhvanova told Kasparov.ru that the police most likely obtained the ecologists’ home addresses from computers confiscated from the organization at the end of January, supposedly for using unlicensed software.

The ecologists believe that the police visits and confiscations are a direct result of the organization’s protest against the reopening of the infamous Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill. In particular, Rikhvanova was critical of a notification from the city sanitation department, which claimed that the mill would clean its sewage before dumping it into Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“But nobody knows how they’re going to clean it, or if they’re going to clean it at all, because all of the cleaning equipment is kept out under the open sky and, as the mill’s management said earlier, a minimum of three months of above-freezing temperatures are required to start it up,” Rikhvanova explained.

The organization is planning to hold a rally in defense of the lake on March 20.

After decades of protests, the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill was closed in October 2008 due to environmental concerns regarding the mill’s discharge of toxic waste into Lake Baikal: Over the course of 40 years of operation, toxic discharge created dead zone in the lake of more than 12 square miles. Hundreds of tons of waste stored in open-air pits have created more air pollution than almost anywhere else in Russia.

Despite this, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a decree in mid-January to change the environmental laws previously prohibiting waste from being dumped into the lake, thus allowing the mill to resume operations. Approximately two thousand people gathered in protest on February 13, demanding that the mill be closed, that mill owner and oligarch Oleg Deripaska be held accountable, and that Prime Minister Putin resign. Police responded to the protest with greatly excessive measures, calling out armored vehicles and a small tank to flank the demonstrators.