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Relevant to AI governance and deployment risks, illustrating how facial recognition can be weaponized by authoritarian states with minimal legal oversight, offering a case study in unregulated AI deployment at scale.
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Importance: 42/100news articlenews
Summary
A 2024 report by RKS Global details Russia's expanding facial recognition surveillance infrastructure, highlighting legal ambiguity, lack of oversight, and use against protesters and draft evaders. The system, centered in Moscow but expanding nationally, relies on vendors like NtechLab and Tevian, operates without explicit federal regulation, and produces evidence used in courts despite opacity and abuse risks.
Key Points
- •Russia lacks explicit federal laws regulating governmental facial recognition, creating legal ambiguity exploited by authorities and enabling black markets for surveillance data.
- •Moscow's system integrates CCTV storage, police IT tools (PARSIV), and AI from NtechLab, VisionLabs, and Tevian; the Metro runs its own facial recognition system (Sfera).
- •The 2022 Unified Biometrics System Law made the state the exclusive controller of biometric data, requiring all entities to transfer facial and voice data to government databases.
- •Facial recognition results are used as court evidence and for political repression despite low image quality standards and no parliamentary or judicial oversight.
- •The EU sanctioned Tevian and NtechLab for their role in enabling state surveillance, and Russia plans to expand the system beyond Moscow using significant public funds.
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| AI Surveillance and Regime Durability Model | Analysis | 64.0 |
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# Researchers spotlight Russia’s opaque facial recognition surveillance system
Jun 21, 2024, 12:40 pm EDT \|
[Masha Borak](https://www.biometricupdate.com/author/mashaborak)
Categories [Biometrics News](https://www.biometricupdate.com/biometric-news) \| [Facial Recognition](https://www.biometricupdate.com/biometric-news/facial-recognition-biometric-articles) \| [Surveillance](https://www.biometricupdate.com/biometric-news/surveillance-biometric-articles)
In recent years, Russia has been [attracting attention](https://www.biometricupdate.com/202303/russia-allegedly-using-facial-recognition-to-preventatively-detain-protesters) for its use of facial recognition surveillance to track down protestors, opposition members and citizens evading the military draft. A new report details the rise of surveillance in the country, its legal foundations and its potential future paths.
The report, titled State of Surveillance, was written by an anonymous team of self-described online freedom experts under the name [RKS Global](https://rks.global/en/).
The research highlights the legal ambiguity of facial recognition: Currently, there are no federal laws that explicitly regulate governmental use of the technology or state-wide facial recognition systems. Instead, authorities rely on exemptions from existing laws to cover their legal basis.
“The absence of explicit regulation on the use of facial recognition, its admissibility as court evidence, and the overall opacity of relevant procedures contribute to the abuse of police access to the database and to the existence of black data market,” the report says.
The story of Russia’s facial recognition surveillance begins in Moscow where authorities have been building the infrastructure for years. This includes the Unified Data Storage and Processing Center, a central video data storage that presumably collects all CCTV cameras and a significant share of public cameras. Data from the storage center is linked to PARSIV (Subsystem for Automatic Registration of Scenarios for Indexing Video-information), an IT software used by the police to search for suspected criminals.
Citywide deployment of AI systems began during the COVID-19 pandemic with the help of algorithms provided by [NtechLab](https://www.biometricupdate.com/companies/ntechlab), [VisionLabs](https://www.biometricupdate.com/companies/visionlabs-b-v) and [Tevian](https://www.biometricupdate.com/tag/tevian). The city also has a Safe City Program, which integrates public transportation, health and law enforcement information systems. The Moscow Metro operates its own facial recognition system named Sfera.
“The main troubling aspect of the use of facial recognition in Moscow is that the procedure of gathering reference images is completely opaque, as well as its subs
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