April 15, 2020

Moscow turns "digital reserve" with no cancellation date set

topic:	Digital Rights
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

The system of total surveillance which the authorities have been installing in Moscow will probably stay in place after the reason for its creation, the coronavirus epidemic, disappears, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced on Monday.

Sobyanin also said that the authorities would keep monitoring foreigners and locals who contacted visitors. Meaning, they would track the people via cell phones and street CCTV face recognition networks. 

Sobyanin stressed that electronic tracking did not violate any rights and freedoms of the people because "all personal data collected will be destroyed upon the threat of epidemy departs". Still, Russian experts all agree that it is naive to trust those promises, because Sobyanin ordered to develop the city-wide big data collection network in November 2019, long before any news about coronavirus popped up.

Everything concerning citizens' movements monitoring lays in a legal "grey area", Lev Ponomarev stresses, human rights veteran activist and director of the Movement For Human Rights. 

"Russian citizens don't quite trust the law enforcement agencies, to put it mildly, so they are afraid of the possibility that the police can use their personal data. They are certain the big data has been collected for the reasons which have nothing to do with countering infectious diseases", he says.

The MHR has been tagged as a "foreign agent" by the Russian authorities since 2019. After President Vladimir Putin gave a green light to the regional authorities to introduce any restrictions they may invent, Moscow Mayor has started to build what the locals immediately called "the digital concentration camp".

As it often happens in this country, though, the authorities have been unable to enforce those measures in full, thus bringing about extra mess to the city governance.

Starting Monday, all people arriving in Moscow or moving around the city have been ordered to obtain electronic passes via the city government's website. However, no one was able to do so because the online pass desk went down the night before.

That presented Moscouvites with a challenge: either ignore the requirement to obtain the passes or to stay home until the resource is revitalised.

IT experts warned in advance that such a glitch can happen but this time the problem has come from the outside, chairperson of the Security Committee in the Moscow City Hall Inna Svyatenko says.

"The pass desk was down due to DDOS attack originated from Spain. I can't explain why hackers want to disrupt the system. Anyway, our IT team is as smart as they get, so the system will be reinstalled by Wednesday", she guarantees.

Svaytenko warned that the denial of access to the pass desk can't justify a lack of the passes for those desired to enter Moscow or leave their homes in the city: "Police wouldn't buy such excuses and will fine the violators anyway".

By Tuesday, Moscow police caught about 900 thousand people moving around the city with no passes or with the self-made mock passes. They all were fined by 4,000 rubles ($50).

The pass-issuing resource was attacked, head of the Electronic State Expert Center Andrei Annenkov echoes.  "This is deliberate sabotage and political hooliganism - because even if several millions of users are requesting the access simultaneously, the server is powerful enough to stay operational. The website was tested in stress regime and it passes the tests", he says.

Annenkov also guarantees that the foreign hackers lack resources to counter Moscow city government's IT teams. "Metaphorically speaking, the saboteurs succeeded to block one highway leading into the city. Before police clear the obstruction, the drivers may use other highways", he explains.

Moscow government has been trying to put blame on foreign hackers to conceal their own flaws, head of the Open Russia movement Anastasia Burakova believes.

"Our IT guys found out that the website was down on Sunday. They suppose that something went wrong in the process of launching the pass system. Our geeks found several critical flaws in the website's programme code threatening stability of its work", she says.

Burakova says she isn't aware of any hacking groups which could be interested in derailing the project because that would only add troubles to the common people in Russia.

Still, not all Russian citizens agree to follow the authorities' orders to reveal their personal data to the Big Brother. "If some people are ready to wear an electronic neck strip, I'm not one of them. I will not give up my freedom to anyone", says Eugeny Kafelnikov, formes tennis champion.

Image by geralt