The Kremlin has taken advantage of digitalization and uses every opportunity for state propaganda and people tracking. This can be achieved, thanks to the security cameras with facial recognition that are everywhere inside the underground stations of the Russian capital.
Every time the police arrest someone, the cameras react to his face, although most of the time they don’t understand why, that’s why they release him after a few hours. It looks like their faces are in some kind of database.
Cameras everywhere
For many Russians, it is becoming increasingly difficult to evade authorities’ scrutiny as the government actively monitors social media accounts and uses surveillance cameras against activists.
Even an online platform, once praised by users for its easy navigation through bureaucratic matters, is now being used as a control tool. The authorities even plan to enlist her to serve military drafts, preventing deserters from escaping by avoiding receiving their conscription papers in person.
Human rights campaigners claim that Russia under President Vladimir Putin has exploited digital technology to monitor, censor and control the population, creating what some call a “cyber gulag” – a dark reference to the labor camps they held political prisoners in the Soviet era.
This is new territory, even for a nation with a long history of spying on its citizens.
Digitization otherwise
The Kremlin has really taken advantage of digitization and is using every opportunity for state propaganda, to track people, to de-anonymize internet users, said the head of a legal practice at Roskomsvoboda, a Russian internet freedom group that Kremlin considers it a “foreign agent”.
The Kremlin’s apparent indifference to digital surveillance appeared to be changing after the 2011-12 mass protests organized online, prompting authorities to tighten cyber controls.
Some regulations allowed them to block websites. Others asked mobile phone operators and internet providers to store records and call messages before sharing the information with security services, if necessary.
Authorities have pressured companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook to store their users’ data on Russian servers to no avail, and have announced the creation of a “sovereign internet” that could very easily cut off the rest of the world.
Many experts initially dismissed these efforts as futile, while some still consider them ineffective. Russia’s measures may look like a low fence compared to the Great Wall of China, but the Kremlin’s online crackdown has gained momentum.
Internet censorship
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, online censorship and prosecution of social media posts and comments rose to record levels.
According to Net Freedoms, a prominent internet rights group, more than 610,000 websites were blocked or removed by authorities in 2022 (the highest annual total in 15 years) and 779 people faced criminal charges for their comments and posts. online, also a number that has never been recorded before.
A major factor in all of this was a law passed a week after the invasion that criminalized anti-war sentiment, explains Net Freedoms head Damir Gaynutdinov. Specifically, this law prohibits the “spreading of false information” or the “discrediting” of the military.
Human Rights Watch also cites another 2022 law that allows authorities to “extrajudicially shut down media outlets and block online content for spreading “false information” about the behavior of the Russian armed forces or other state actors in abroad or to spread calls for sanctions against Russia.”
Evil without end
The stories of those who have been hunted down from one moment to the next are mainly related to the social networking platform VKontakte, which is believed to be cooperating with the authorities. Thus, 65-year-old Marina Novikova was convicted this month in the Siberian city of Seversk of “spreading false information” about the military and anti-war Telegram posts, and was fined $12,400.
Similarly, a Moscow court just last week sentenced opposition activist Mikhail Krieger to seven years in prison for expressing a desire to “hang” Putin in Facebook comments. Prominent blogger Nika Belotcherkovskaya, who lives in France, was also sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for Instagram posts about the war that authorities claimed spread “lies” about Russia’s military.
And there seems to be no end to the evil, as everyone today fears that online censorship will expand drastically with the use of Artificial Intelligence systems that will check social media and websites for material that may be offensive even faster, easier and more thoroughly. considered illegal and lead to arrests, fines and imprisonment.
It seems the cyber gulags are here to stay.
