Tough virus laws playing straight into the hands of Russian autocracy

Moscow is the past master of the secret state and Covid-19 is giving it free rein to introduce tough new rules such as mobile phone tracking and enhanced face-recognition CCTV. What is less clear is the regime’s capacity to implement its totalitarian vision, says Oliver Carroll

The worst of the surveillance would be reserved for those with the Covid-19 infection (Anadolu/Getty)

If you are feeling anxious, angry, bemused, and/or bewildered, spare a thought for Muscovites. Last Wednesday, residents of the Russian capital were told by their president to prepare for a week of paid, non-working leave. On Friday, Vladimir Putin’s staff clarified things somewhat: “non-working leave” did not mean non-working, just “not being at work”. On Sunday evening, the advisory changed again: “leave” meant “compulsory lockdown” with no right to be on the streets without permission.

By Monday morning, details of Moscow’s dystopian lockdown plan had found their way into the local media. According to what appears to be a policy draft, bureaucrats are finalising a system that will divide citizens into four castes. Top dogs are the bureaucrats, MPs and law enforcement, for whom Moscow remains open. Next come key workers – they are free to move between home and place of work provided they have the paperwork. A third category of citizens needing to make regular and longer trips can do so, though only to a prior agreed address.

The fourth category are ordinary citizens – and journalists appear to be among them – who are limited to taking out the rubbish, walking dogs within 100m of their home, and essential supermarket or medicine runs.

The protocols leave nothing to chance. A simple task such as buying food will require multi-stage verification. Users will be asked to register with biometric details, address and region. Only once a citizen has downloaded a temporary QR barcode to their smartphone can they think about leaving home and buying that prized packet of buckwheat.

The same reports say that adherence to the new rules will be governed by new police brigades; mobile phone tracking; bank records; and use of the city’s face-recognition enhanced CCTV network.

The plans appear to represent an extraordinary example of mission creep; a cover for authorities to harvest data on their anxious citizens. Here, of course, Russia is hardly alone. All across the world, governments are using the public health emergency to double down on control. But Moscow is the past master of the secret state, delivered with the help of sweat-inducing acronyms from NKVD and KGB to FSB and GRU, and it seems particularly well placed to take advantage of the new authoritarian turn.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is being talked about as the heir apparent (AP)

What is less clear is the regime’s current capacity to implement any totalitarian vision. An axiom of recent Russian history has been that the most outrageous legislative efforts have generally been hamstrung by the most amateurish implementation.

In 2018, for example, authorities tried to block the Telegram messenger app: a considerably less taxing operation than putting the entire population under surveillance. The battle turned out to be an embarrassing disaster. As Telegram hid its traffic behind dynamic IP addresses, Russia’s censors took a hammer to large parts of the internet. Banks, shops and even the Kremlin’s own site were inadvertently smashed before, eventually, the authorities admitted defeat.

All the signs are that history is repeating itself. On Tuesday evening, Moscow city officials hastily removed an early version of their surveillance tool from smartphone app stores after programmers revealed an array of security vulnerabilities. Not only was the app pulling in all kinds of user data without permission, it was also sending the unencrypted user data to servers in the United States, Germany and Estonia. Moscow’s officials later claimed the application was “test” – but few were convinced.

In conversations with The Independent, technical experts said Moscow authorities were totally unprepared for the challenge they seemed to have set themselves.

In the plus column, city authorities have over the past seven years invested billions building a sophisticated CCTV network. Drawing on nearly 200,000 cameras on streets and front doors, officials can, with a bit of luck, locate wanted men by scanning the image against a small photographic database. Moscow has also spent huge sums on tenders for its own big data sets – the exact details of which remain top secret.

But Moscow’s systems are by no means comprehensive. Not every camera is of sufficiently high resolution to pull faces from a crowd, let alone faces in medical masks. None of the systems are set up to communicate with the 12.5 million user profiles that Moscow residents are supposed to send in.

“The system is useful if you have small lists of targets that you can give to a local policeman to monitor,” says the surveillance expert and author Andrei Soldatov. “You can’t scale the system up to tens of millions of users. Too much of it is offline.”

Citizens will be divided into four groups and issued with QR codes (Tass) (Valery Sharifulin/TASS)

Other parts of the plan – notably mobile tracking and issuing QR codes – are theoretically achievable. Harvesting mobile data to create location “alerts”, for example, is unlikely to represent a real challenge to the government, Soldatov says; the equipment is already on operators’ servers. But pairing this with a huge amount of user data in a short space of time was “unrealistic”.

Data expert Ivan Begtin agrees that integrating databases is unachievable in the short- to mid-term. Speaking with The Independent, he nonetheless worried about the damage that could be done trying: “The problem with the authorities’ plan is less evil intent as it is lousy implementation. They released an app with a huge number of coding errors. Asking for a large amount of data while being technically illiterate is a dangerous cocktail.”

The problem with the authorities’ plan is less evil intent as it is lousy implementation. They released an app with a huge number of coding errors. Asking for a large amount of data while being technically illiterate is a dangerous cocktail

Political commentator Konstantin Gaaze, who previously worked as a governmental advisor, said local government servers would likely buckle under the volume of data involved. “The situation would be akin to the launch of Obamacare in the United States,” he says, “but when the system collapses, it won’t be their problem, it will be yours.”

How far the authorities eventually go is anyone’s guess. On Wednesday, some reports suggested the worst of the surveillance would be reserved for those with proven Covid-19 infection. What seems more certain is that the quarantine measures – whatever they turn out to be – will end up defining the career of Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin. In recent weeks, the quiet technocrat has come to the fore in Russia’s coronavirus effort, and is now being talked about as heir apparent.

According to several sources, Mayor Sobyanin was compelled to such Draconian action by the rising numbers of infections, and a weak response to government pleas to stay at home. The Independent understands that, in fact, the mayor’s team only came to the idea of QR codes and quarantine after a larger, military-led operation to seal off the capital had been ruled out. In other words, the new restrictions were less a show of force as a demonstration of weakness.

In a written statement to The Independent, Human Rights Watch stopped short of criticising the Moscow government for the plans. Authorities had “good reason” to effect lockdown in a global pandemic, its regional director Rachel Denber said, adding that the response “needs to be necessary and proportionate”.

Plenty of space: Muscovites in face masks on the metro yesterday (Tass) (Gavriil Grigorov/TASS)

When the time eventually comes to reflect on this bizarre period, the world will no doubt be grappling with its with multiple consequences. The shops, cafes and restaurants that no longer exist. The millions of workers who lost their livelihoods. The airlines that went bust. The expanded governments. The emergency legislation. Growing authoritarianism.

But perhaps the most significant switches will be in the minds of society itself.

“Here in Russia, you already see changes with people overestimating dangers, demanding control of movement, cutting the country off from abroad,” says Soldatov. “These anxious habits are with us for the long term. There are no prizes for guessing who will benefit.”