The ban on a large number of conversation packages, a couple of responsibilities imposed on virtual firms and voters within the title of transparency and the struggle in opposition to “extremism”, ubiquitous surveillance cameras in giant towns, an increasing number of efficient facial reputation programs… The present context is appropriate for the advance, in Russia, of an built-in gadget that may permit the federal government to observe its voters increasingly sparsely.
From September 1, 2025, in Moscow (the capital of the Russian Federation), migrant employees from visa-free nations will have to set up an software on their smartphone that may transmit their geolocation information in actual time to the services and products of the Ministry of Interior Affairs. If geolocation is deactivated or the appliance is deleted, migrants will likely be integrated within the check in of “persons under control”; their monetary transactions and SIM playing cards will likely be blocked; and is also expelled. This experiment will proceed till 2029, and then this tradition might be prolonged to different areas of Russia.
This regulation, which is a part of a chain of measures geared toward accelerating virtual keep watch over in Russia for the reason that starting of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is a take a look at of the potential for complete surveillance of all voters of the rustic.
The reminiscence, nonetheless alive, of the totalitarian dispositions at paintings within the Soviet Union (USSR) – the suppression of freedoms, the surveillance of the inhabitants, the status quo of the Iron Curtain and overall censorship – symbolized through the gulag gadget (exertions camps the place political prisoners had been despatched, amongst others, for crimes in opposition to opinion), gave beginning to the components that implies “digital digital technological gulag increasingly”. keep watch over in trendy Russia.
Parts of keep watch over and supervision of voters, presented in 2022
Till 2022, surveillance and censorship basically involved the political sphere, particularly the struggle in opposition to the opposition. Since then, confronted with rising discontent, the state has discovered it important to increase its keep watch over over all spaces of public existence.
Panoptic jail construction, artist’s influence. Adam Simpson/Blue Akasha/Pinterest, CC BI-NC-SA
Russia is regularly organising what might be known as a “digital panopticon”. At first designed through Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the panopticon was once a proposed round jail with a central watchtower. Within the panopticon, the guard can see the entire prisoners, however they do not know if they’re being watched. From this comes the sensation that you’re repeatedly being watched. This sense is an increasing number of shared through the population of recent Russia, since the building of applied sciences permits the protection services and products and the state get admission to to an ever-increasing quantity of private information and dependable keep watch over of voters at their very own discretion.
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine introduced in February 2022, the government temporarily followed new regulations that criminalize the dissemination of knowledge that deviates from the Kremlin’s respectable place. Those requirements – punishing the “spread of fake news” and “discrediting” the Russian military, cracking down on texts focused on “foreign agents” – determine strict censorship and, in impact, criminalize any opinion or data other from that coming from respectable state assets.
On the identical time, the regime continues to increase virtual answers. From December 2022, all firms that accumulate biometric information of voters are obliged to switch it to the Unified State Biometric Machine (EBS). The regulation does now not restrict regulation enforcement government from consulting this information. This creates the technological foundation for popular use of facial reputation programs, which can be already actively used to spot after which arrest protestors and “enemies of the state”.
Within the duration from 2025 to 2026, the Ministry of Virtual Building of the Russian Federation plans to spend 2 billion rubles (greater than 20 million euros) at the introduction of a novel platform with synthetic intelligence to procedure movies from surveillance cameras right through Russia. Greater than 200,000 cameras have already been put in in Moscow on my own, which the police use to observe and analyze conduct.
Some other digital gadget, the army conscription check in, objectives to answer the chaos brought about through the mobilization of 2022 and the flight of loads of 1000’s of guys and their households in another country.
The program combines non-public information from different state databases and enriches it with data supplied through employers and banks. Thru it, digital invites are despatched, which can be regarded as to had been robotically dropped at the recipients a couple of days after showing on this database. From then on, till reporting to an army police station (the title given to the facilities answerable for managing the army mobilization of the inhabitants), an individual is robotically prohibited from leaving the rustic and is topic to different restrictions, together with the ban on riding a car.
Sovereign web or virtual iron curtain?
American author and thinker Shoshana Zuboff coined the time period “surveillance capitalism,” a gadget during which broad companies personal our information and check out to are expecting and keep watch over our conduct. She wonders if IT firms that grasp broad quantities of private information, similar to Google, Meta, Amazon and others, can have extra energy than states.
In Russia, the solution is already in entrance of our eyes: all main Russian IT firms with their customers’ non-public information are both passed over to the Kremlin or blocked.
After the beginning of the struggle, the IT massive Yandex (the Russian an identical of Google) was once compelled to actively filter out data in its browser and information. It now labels some assets as unreliable and spreads false data, whilst selling the ones dependable to the respectable place.
The international massive Meta, declared an extremist group in March 2022, has been blocked on Russian territory, in addition to its Fb and Instagram services and products. Ks (previously Twitter) and plenty of unbiased media had been additionally blocked. YouTube is slowed and, in reality, blocked.
In August 2025, Roskomnadzor (the Russian company that offers with censorship at the Web and blocking off of knowledge sources deemed unwanted) blocked the power to make audio and video calls on Telegram and WhatsApp. Even supposing the respectable explanation why for that is to offer protection to in opposition to phone fraud, actually this procedure is going hand in hand with the release of state messages, MAKS, to which regulation enforcement government have complete get admission to.
Messaging will likely be built-in into the gadget of virtual public services and products. The straightforward truth of the usage of a VPN provider to circumvent blocking off is thought of as an tense circumstance when a “crime” is dedicated, similar to looking for “extremist content” (a time period whose definition, intentionally obscure, permits prosecutions to be introduced on flimsy grounds).
By way of November 2025, Russia will release a synthetic intelligence (AI) program to censor books. First of all, this system will best search for drug-related propaganda in books. As is incessantly the case, if a success, the state may simply prolong censorship to complaint of the federal government or the army, and even to seek for paperwork with an LGBTKIA+ theme, figuring out that the “LGBTKIA+ movement” is assessed as extremist.
Against virtual totalitarianism?
Thus, in lower than 3 years, Russia has constructed a coherent and interconnected gadget, the place legislative bans on data are bolstered through overall surveillance applied sciences, and virtual keep watch over of voters guarantees the implementation of repressive regulations.
Those regulations and technological answers gather in a snowball impact, resulting in the sluggish habituation of the inhabitants. Below the pretext of shielding voters from more than a few threats – the context of struggle and sanctions, terrorist assaults, fraud – the state is doing the entirety to toughen the whole energy of Vladimir Putin.
Within the twentieth century, the thinker Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) promoted a pluralistic and liberal choice to totalitarianism, implying the life of a sphere of human existence loose from state interference, surveillance and keep watch over, which he known as the “sphere of negative freedom” (detrimental within the sense of “unfettered”). As of late, we’re witnessing the drastic tightening of this sphere in Russia and the revolutionary building of “digital totalitarianism”, i.e. totalitarian energy armed now not best with repressive regulations, but in addition with new applied sciences: cameras, digital databases and an increasing number of subtle synthetic intelligence.
