State of Surveillance: Researchers Spotlight Russia’s Facial Recognition System

by Masha Borak | Biometric Update

In recent years, Russia has been attracting attention 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.

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. Read Full Article >