"The Kremlin are a very vengeful bunch," said Dan Storyev, English managing editor at OVD-Info. "After [Alexei Navalny's] funeral they're now coming after people, trying to find their faces on CCTV footage." At least 19 people who attended recent events in support of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who died in a Russian prison in February, have been detained after their images were identified by Moscow's surveillance systems. These include a woman who laid flowers in Navalny's memory on the day he died, and another who was captured on video at his funeral, according to Russian human rights organization OVD-Info. "The Kremlin are very technologically sophisticated in what they're doing. They're experts at destroying civil society and building an authoritarian regime… they're trying to use every tool at their disposal to hold on to power and the arsenal that they have is massive," Storyev said.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), in partnership with Follow the Money and Paper Trail Media, investigated links between a gig work platform and Russian surveillance programs. Gig workers, who are paid to perform micro-tasks online, were hired to train the same facial recognition software used throughout Moscow via an Amsterdam-based platform called Toloka.
This subsidiary of tech giant Yandex, often referred to as the "Russian Google", was looking for workers for two Russian companies – Tevian and NTechLab. Both have been sanctioned by the EU for their contribution to "serious human rights violations in Russia, including arbitrary arrests and detentions." This prohibits any European companies from collaborating with them. Toloka told TBIJ that the two companies had an agreement with Yandex's Russian subsidiary.
Tevian and NTechLab are major suppliers of software to Moscow's public surveillance system, one of the most extensive in the world. Facial recognition cameras, placed across the city and its metro, scan faces that pass by, seeking out matches with its "watchlist".
"You can be in any place in Moscow, you can be recognized immediately and this can be used against you," said Alexey Gusev. In March 2021, when he was a local politician, he received a phone call that changed the course of his life. According to Gusev, the police said they had a video of him attending a protest in support of Navalny, and asked him to report to the station. Less than two weeks later, he fled Moscow before he could be tried for attending and organizing the protest, although he received a fine for "taking part in an uncoordinated mass action." "I had to leave Russia because I realized that this case was becoming serious and the criminal conviction was highly likely to happen," he said. Gusev does not deny attending the protest but says he was not an organizer.
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