Well, he is somewhat right. Snooping tech that three-letter-agencies have here is likely to be well beyond anything Russia can possibly have. I've seen some of it in Russia about 15 years back (to my shame, as a student, participated in the development) and even though my code was kinda ok-ish, this was literally child's play ;) You could monitor small percentage of phone calls, but it is a far cry from bulk wiretapping, voice recognition and search/analytics/social-network-analysis that is probably in place here.