First begun in 2017, my World War Privacy series has looked at the United States; the United Kingdom; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; China; and the push for more surveillance in the era of COVID-19.
Today we’re going to look at a remaining super-power that has a long history of using surveillance to oppress their own citizens as well as aggressively against other nations: Russia.
Before we start, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s a lot to unpack here and not everything will be covered. The WWP series tries to look at what’s going on in the 21st century, so won’t be delving into the long history of surveillance in the USSR. Nor will I be covering the current state of play regarding cyber-warfare, as trying to explore that topic succinctly is almost impossible given the disinformation campaigns from all sides.
Rather, we’re here to explore how the right to privacy is being eroded through the actions of the Russian government in co-operation with its own corporate sector; as is often the case around the world. Russia, like other world powers covered in this series, are racing towards a future in which surveillance both domestic and foreign is as powerful and all-encompassing as modern technology can allow.
The categories below provide a number of links to help you explore this erosion of privacy in more detail, a starting point to help you explore this theatre in World War Privacy.
CCTV & Facial Recognition
Let’s start with good old-fashioned CCTV. A long staple of countries such as the United States, China and the UK; Russia hasn’t lagged behind when it comes to the installation of surveillance cameras. Moscow and St Petersburg are both ranked in the top 50 most surveilled cities in the world, although not really holding a candle to places such as London in the UK, but perhaps most concerningly is the extent to which facial recognition software is being implemented into public surveillance systems.
Russia has been leading the charge globally, alongside China, with implementing advanced facial recognition software that allows them to find and track individuals in real time. This has even progressed to the extent that facial recognition payment systems are coming into play in Moscow supermarkets and other food and retail stores. The Russian company X5 has teamed up with Visa to roll out such technology rapidly; and seemingly with widespread agreement (at least publicly) that this is a useful technology that people are looking forward to using.
This approach is also being used to embed facial recognition systems within the underground rail network in Moscow, through the use of the Face Pay system at turnstiles – which already had extensive facial recognition systems installed in over 1,500 rail carriages, making it one of the most comprehensive rail surveillance systems in the world.
Most worryingly, perhaps, is the move to install facial recognition surveillance into 43,000 schools throughout Russia – bringing the entirety of their school education system under the purview of a system labelled, darkly, ‘Orwell’. This shows how all-encompassing the technology will quickly become; and how it will be able to control people throughout all aspects of their day-to-day living and even throughout their entire lives from children to adulthood.
In a similar fashion to the moves we are seeing in other places around the world, facial recognition technology in Russia has also come under fire by human rights activists for its use in collecting data on people attending peaceful protests. When you combine this with Russia’s general mistreatment and state persecution of dissidents, the detrimental impact of such technology is already coming to fruition and can only really get worse from here.
COVID-19 Surveillance
Like many countries around the world, looked at more generally in a previous World War Privacy post, Russia has taken full advantage of the global pandemic to implement surveillance.
The tools mentioned previously, particularly facial recognition CCTV, have been coupled with things such as digital passes and geo-location tracking of people’s mobile phones to track individuals in real-time; with instant alerts to authorities should they breach the terms of any COVID-19 restriction put in place. Moscow also joined other regions around the world in utilising surveillance drones to monitor civilians and alert nearby police for any quarantine breaches.
The digital passes, first required to travel on public transportation in Moscow during the lockdown periods put in place during April 2020, have been extended into electronic vaccination certificates and the use of digital ‘COVID passports’ that allow individuals to circumvent some of the tighter restrictions on things such as travel. This is in line with many areas around the world, including the EU which is implementing its own form of vaccine passport, but the earlier mandatory use of the digital passes in 2020 has allowed for the roll-out in Russia to occur more quickly and comprehensively.
Sovereign Internet Laws
In 2019, Russia introduced a series of laws that gave the state a huge amount of control over the internet in a move that many have likened to the ‘Great Fire Wall’ approach taken in China. Under the usual guise of ‘cybersecurity’, these laws not only allow for widespread censorship and blocking of information the Russian government deems against its own interests – but also set up perpetual surveillance at the ISP level of all internet traffic through Deep Packet Inspection.
It’s important to note that this approach is also taken by other major superpowers, including the United States, China and Iran; so it represents the global shift that governments are taking towards total surveillance of citizen activities online. Once in place, these systems can also be used to throttle access to any websites deemed undesirable – such as has recently happened with Twitter following their unwillingness to censor certain topics on behalf of the Russian government. This approach has already backfired, however, and caused unforeseen issues with other parts of the internet in Russia – including government websites and major telecoms providers that saw connection dropouts.
The push for deeper control of how Russians use and can be monitored online continues, though, and will almost certainly not improve in the foreseeable future – with moves to recreate entire elements of the open internet (such as Wikipedia) for Russian users. This is in similar fashion to the approach China has taken, which allows for even closer surveillance and control of their own citizens while also building a barrier that makes it more difficult for foreign companies to profit in the country.
Satellites, Drones & Spy Planes
The last five years has seen a huge uptick in space-capable nations beginning to assert dominance and stake a claim outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Many years in the planning, Russia has recently launched new Signals Intelligence satellites into orbit with reports that the new Liana system is 100x more accurate than previous ones.
Alongside this have been the expansion of more traditional forms of aerial surveillance, with the development of spy plane technologies but also more recently the expansion of drone technology into the areas of surveillance but also increasingly as a long-range unmanned weapons system. In perhaps a less concerning and more interesting technological sense, Russia has developed smaller battlefield surveillance and targeting drones that are designed to look like owls.
In the area of aerial surveillance, there’s been more instances recently of encounters between Russian forces and US spy planes – including one that occurred just this past week over the Pacific Ocean that highlights how prolific these technologies are becoming and their use on the front-lines of geopolitical positioning.
Hackers and Data Leaks
It’s impossible to avoid the media coverage on the extensive network of Russian hackers and other forms of cyberwarfare conducted – including the massive breach of government departments in the United States that occurred in recent months. This even extended into additional hacks on those who were investigating the breaches, showing that our new digital world is truly a different landscape than ever before.
Whether the reporting of Russian hackers is based on facts or self-serving propaganda (certainly a mixture of both), state-sponsored or emerging from organised crime networks, the Russian hacking industry is prolific and has been behind huge leaks of private data. This has recently included leaks that are politically motivated, such as the release of names and email addresses of those involved in campaigning for opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
Interestingly, this has even extended into leaks of data of those connected to criminal activity; such as the recent breach of customer data from the illegal marketplace Swarmshop.
Conclusion
If you start to look at the rapid push for surveillance technologies around the world, it can feel like we are on an inevitable decline in which personal privacy is abolished in favour of convenience and state access to our day-to-day lives. All three of the major global superpowers (Russia, China and the United States) seem eerily aligned in the roll-out of this technology, teaming up with large multinational companies that are going to profit massively from the erosion of civil liberties hidden under the guise of a modern, technology-based lifestyle.
This can all seem nihilistic, in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it, however there is also a growing recognition that alternatives need to develop to counter what would otherwise become an all-encompassing umbrella of state power over individual agency.
There is hope, at least, in our acknowledgement of the issue and the knowledge that human ingenuity and collective effort can always overcome regimes of oppression and control.
