Vladimir Putin tries to push its power with the power of artificial intelligence. A document leak from inside the Kremlin reveals that Putin is building a massive surveillance system in Russia that can be used against “disloyal” citizens.
At the heart of the system is a facial recognition program that can analyze people and their features in seconds and compare them to previously collected facial data. The program is already in use in dozens of cities in Russia.
Putin is ready to spend large sums of money on surveillance. According to the leaked documents, Putin’s administration plans to finance the AI-based surveillance system with at least more than 11 billion rubles, or more than 110 million euros, between 2024 and 2026.
The system is managed from the Presidential Administration Research and Data Center in Glavnivts.
The Kremlin documents were originally leaked to the Estonian news website Delfi. This article has been made in cooperation with several European media. has previously published several articles based on leaked material containing Kremlin budget documents.
The camera recognizes a person’s mood
The technology of facial recognition software used by Russia is very advanced. It can track people in real time and can read moods based on facial expressions.
The company that developed the software by its algorithm can accurately recognize facial features regardless of, for example, a person’s age, glasses or beard.
Moscow alone already has hundreds of thousands surveillance cameras that utilize facial recognition. They have been installed in public spaces, such as along the metro system, on roads and in residential buildings.
Facial recognition was also recently used To Alexei Navalny to identify the people who participated in the funeral, says the Russian human rights organization OVD-info, which collects information on arrests made on political grounds. According to the organization, at least 19 people who were at the funeral were later arrested using facial recognition.
According to the human rights organization OVD-info, it is problematic that people do not know what information is collected about them.
– The police can come to them days, weeks or even months later, says OVD-info’s lawyer Maria Nemova.
Facial recognition was supposed to improve the world
Facial recognition in Russia has been developed by a company called NtechLab. It now receives hefty license fees from Putin’s administration.
In 2021, the company described itself as the world leader in artificial intelligence software as a developer.
– We have a search tool that can go through 1.5 billion images in less than 0.3 seconds, beamed the company’s CEO at the time Andrei Telenkov At the innovation event of the G20 countries in Sorrento, Italy.
At the time, Telenkov boasted that facial recognition would make the world a safer place because it would help in finding missing people, helping the elderly and preventing crime.
In the same year, people who took part in demonstrations in support of Alexei Navalny were arrested en masse in different parts of Russia using facial recognition.
The founders of NtechLab are no longer involved in the company’s operations. They wanted to stop all operations in Russia after Navalny’s poisoning in 2020, but the rest of the company’s management and investors disagreed.
– It became clear that the country was headed for disaster, but no one believed that they would start a war, the company’s former executive Artyom Kuharenko said for Reuters.
The system was used in the soccer World Cup
The Russian government already used NtechLab’s facial recognition in the 2018 FIFA World Cup home games. At that time, surveillance cameras were installed in stadiums and areas intended for supporters.
According to NtechLab, 1.8 million visitors were monitored during the Games. The obtained data was compared to databases of known criminals and persons of interest to the authorities.
Qatar also used the same facial recognition for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. According to FIFA, the international umbrella organization of football, it has no part in the techniques used by the security authorities, but the host countries are responsible for the security measures of the World Cup.
NtechLab on the sanctions list – helped with human rights violations
It is not known whether Russia has used NtechLab’s technology in the areas it seized from Ukraine, but residents of Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, for example, have said that they see significantly more surveillance cameras in public places than before.
Rostec, which manages Russia’s state arms industry companies announcedi already in 2019 that the Russian armed forces and special forces plan to use NtechLab’s facial recognition.
The EU added NtechLab to its sanctions list last summer. According to the justifications, the company had offered “technical and material assistance” to human rights violations committed in Russia, such as arbitrary arrests of opposition activists and independent journalists.
According to the EU, Russian authorities also used NtechLab’s facial recognition in Moscow to locate individuals who tried to evade orders to go to war in Ukraine.
NtechLab currently offers mobile surveillance solutions equipped with up to 24 cameras. The cameras can film for eight hours without a power source up to a kilometer away.
In Russia, it is more and more difficult to hide from the cameras.