Even when journalist Yekaterina Maksimova cannot afford to be late, she avoids using the Moscow metro. That’s because he’s been arrested five times over the past year thanks to cameras equipped with facial recognition technology.

“It looks like I’m listed in some kind of database,” says Maksimova, who has already been arrested twice: in 2019 for participating in a demonstration in Moscow and in 2020 for environmental activism.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for many Russians to avoid government scrutiny as the government actively monitors social media accounts and uses surveillance cameras. Also, persons subject to military service, are now available through the website of public services Gosuslugi, used by millions of Russians for various administrative services. However, one of these services, the issuance of passports, has recently been abolished.

Human rights activists say that Russia is under Vladimir Putin used digital technology to monitor, censor, and control the population, creating what some call a “digital gulag”—a direct reference to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union.

Censorship and online harassment

The Kremlin’s apparent indifference to digital surveillance changed after the mass protests of 2011-2012 began to be coordinated over the Internet, prompting authorities to tighten controls. The authorities have pressured companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook to store user data on Russian servers, to no avail, and have announced plans for a “home internet” that could be cut off from the rest of the world.

Officially, the goal is to give Russia the ability to disconnect from the global internet in the event of a cyber war, and in the meantime create a shielded version of it that the Russians will approve of. It will also give Vladimir Putin more control over the digital fingerprints of Russian citizens.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, online censorship and harassment of posts and comments on social media broke all records.

A decree signed in April by Vladimir Putin raised the maximum sentence for treason charges to life imprisonment. Until now, the Criminal Code provided for imprisonment for a term of 12 to 20 years.

The presidential decree is posted on the Kremlin website. On April 18, the State Duma (lower house) voted for amendments to the Criminal Code, providing for tougher penalties for certain crimes.

Among other things, it also provides for an increase in the maximum sentence on charges of committing a “terrorist act” to 20 years in prison from the current 15. According to the Russian Criminal Code, a “terrorist act” is defined as an act endangering human life and aimed at destabilizing Russia.

“No One’s Safe”

Tighter anti-extremism laws passed in 2014 have targeted social media users, resulting in hundreds of criminal cases for posts, likes and posts. Most involved are users of the popular Russian social network VKontakte, which is said to be cooperating with the authorities.

As the crackdown intensified, authorities also targeted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram. About a week after the hack, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked in Russia, but users of the platforms are still being targeted.

Marina Novikova, 65, was convicted this month in the Siberian city of Seversk for spreading false information about the military and fined more than $12,400. Last week, a Moscow court sentenced opposition activist Mikhail Krieger to seven years in prison for Facebook comments in which he expressed a desire to hang Putin.

In February, state media regulator Roskomnadzor said it was launching Oculus, an artificial intelligence system that searches for banned content in online photos and videos and can analyze more than 200,000 images a day.

Authorities are also working on a bot system that collects information from social media pages, instant messengers and private online groups, according to the Belarusian hacktivist group Cyberpartisans, which obtained the documents from a subsidiary of Roskomnadzor.

Activists say it’s hard to know if the new systems work.

Eyes on the streets

In 2017-18, Moscow authorities launched cameras with facial recognition technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the authorities managed to identify and fine quarantine violators.

There are 250,000 software-activated surveillance cameras in Moscow – at the entrances of houses, in public transport and on the streets. According to him, similar systems exist in St. Petersburg and other large cities such as Novosibirsk and Kazan.

When protests erupted in 2021 over the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the system was used to identify and arrest protesters.

In 2022, “Russian authorities expanded control over people’s biometrics, including by collecting data from banks and using facial recognition technology to track and harass activists,” Human Rights Watch reported this year.

Journalist Yekaterina Maksimova sued the databases, but lost. Authorities declined to explain why she was on surveillance databases, she said, saying it was a “state secret.”

Digital monitoring

Russia’s practice is often compared to China’s, where the authorities make extensive use of digital surveillance. Chinese cities have millions of cameras that recognize people’s faces, body shape and the way they walk to identify them. It looks like the Kremlin wants to follow the same path.

Tatyana Stanovaya, a Russian lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Russia and Eurasia, points out that “the war has taken the state’s need for digital control to a whole new level. The state seeks to completely overhaul the traditional system of state coercion, to automate the control of individual behavior without the involvement of individuals, their lawyers or the courts. Constitutional rights depend on a person’s status in the government’s digital surveillance system.”

“The cybergulag, which was actively talked about during the pandemic, is now taking on a real form,” Stanovaya wrote.

According to the Associated Press