Rights advocates within Russia under Vladimir Putin expressed concern over the government's use of digital technology to track, censor, and control its population.
They call the concept a "cyber gulag," referring to old Soviet labor camps holding political prisoners.
One of the groups criticizing the Russian government's use of new technologies to spy on their own citizens includes Roskomsvoboda, a Russian internet freedom group the Kremlin labeled as a "foreign agent."
Roskomsvoboda head of legal practice Sarkis Darbinyan said the Kremlin's use of digital technology has been beneficial to them as they use every opportunity to use it for "state propaganda, for surveilling people, [and] for de-anonymizing internet users."
Kremlin's Cyber Crackdown
Before the mass protests across Russia in 2011, which were coordinated online through social media, the Russian government was indifferent to monitoring its people through digital means.
Harsher laws were introduced in 2014 targeting social media users and online speech, most of which came from the Russian social media platform VKontakte (VK), which the government forcibly bought from its original owner, Pavel Durov.
Since then, the Kremlin made efforts to regulate internet use, including blocking websites, mandatory phone call and message storage, and pressuring tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook to store user data on Russian servers.
Russia's cyber crackdown efforts gradually gained momentum until its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when online censorship and prosecution for social media dissent skyrocketed.
According to internet rights group Net Freedoms, over 600,000 web pages were blocked or removed by Russian authorities in 2022, the highest annual total in 15 years. There were also 779 people facing criminal charges over online content criticizing the Russian government.
Net Freedoms head Damir Gainutdinov credited the record-high numbers to a law passed and adopted days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The legislation criminalizes anti-war sentiment, such as "spreading false information" about or "discrediting" the Russian armed forces.
"Users of any social media platform shouldn't feel safe," Gainutdinov said.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch cited a separate 2022 law allowing authorities to "extrajudicially close mass media outlets and block online content" that go against the Russian government's narrative.
In February this year, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor announced it was launching Oculus, an AI system monitoring bad content in online photos and videos, including any references to the LGBT+ community. The agency stated the system could analyze over 20,000 images per day, way more than manual analysis, which can only process about 200 a day.
Darbinyan stated the lack of information regarding how Oculus works in monitoring Russian citizens is a concerning and scary proposition.
Everyday Russians Living in Fear
With the Russian government's use of modern technology to track and spy on its own people, everyday Russians feel uncertain about how to freely live their lives.
Between 2017 and 2018, Moscow authorities installed a street camera system that enabled facial recognition technology.
The system was put into good use during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to identify, trace, and fine people violating lockdown rules.
Journalist and activist Yekaterina Maksimova avoid taking the Moscow subway on her everyday commute to avoid detection by the city's facial recognition system built into its security cameras.
She was previously arrested in 2019 for participating in a demonstration in Moscow and in 2020 for her environmental activism. As a result, she was detained five times last year, with the only explanation police could tell her was that the cameras "reacted" to having identified her in the open.
"It seems like I'm in some kind of database," Maksimova said.
In addition, Putin ordered the Russian government to create an online register of individuals who are eligible for military service after discovering that current enlistment records were in disarray and also to discourage draft dodgers.
In a commentary for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya stated the register will collect all kinds of data, from outpatient clinics to courts to tax offices and election commissions."
Authorities would then issue a draft summons to the eligible individual via a government website. Once a summons appeared online, the recipient could not leave Russia, and restrictions would be imposed if the recipient did not comply within 20 days, whether the individual saw the summons or not.
Other individuals accused of dissent include 65-year-old Siberian woman Marina Novikova, who made anti-war posts on Durov's more popular platform, Telegram; opposition activist Mikhail Kriger, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for his Facebook comments expressing a desire "to hang" Putin; and France-based blogger Nika Belotserkovskaya, who received a nine-year prison sentence in absentia for her Instagram posts opposing the war.
According to Stanovaya, the cyber gulag being talked about during the pandemic was now "taking its real shape."
Hackers Fighting Back
According to the Belarusian hacktivist group Cyberpartisans, Russian authorities were also working on a system of bots collecting information from social media pages, messenger apps, and closed online communities.
The group claimed they obtained documents providing information about the bot systems from one of Roskomnadzor's subsidiaries.
Cyberpartisans coordinator Yuliana Shametavets said the bots were expected to infiltrate Russian-language social media groups for surveillance and propaganda.
"Now it's common to laugh at the Russians, to say that they have old weapons and don't know how to fight," she said, "but the Kremlin is great at disinformation campaigns, and there are high-class IT experts who create extremely effective and very dangerous products."
Associated Press requested the Russian media regulator for comment but has since not responded.
