The Moscow authorities will purchase video surveillance services for more than 23.3 billion rubles, Kommersant writes . Tenders for the provision of services to provide information about objects of observation to a single data storage and processing center were placed by the Moscow Department for Competition Policy.
As explained to the publication in the capital's department of information technology, previous contracts have ended, so new purchases are being made. The new contracts will be signed for five years.
They involve the placement of video surveillance at the entrances, in the yards and in public areas, the department said.
Now in Moscow, according to official data, there are 213 thousand video surveillance cameras, access to which is available, in particular, for employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
On April 10, 2020, the BBC wrote that the Moscow authorities are monitoring the residents of the city thanks to the Smart City system, which has been under construction in the capital for more than ten years. Including the mayor's office buys geoanalytical data from mobile operators, which allow you to find out the location of a person, place of residence and routes along which he moves. The authorities also collect data using taxi and car sharing services, Troika cards, GLONASS sensors, surveillance cameras and a face recognition system connected to them.
Participants of rallies and oppositionists were repeatedly identified by CCTV cameras, who were then detained. In January 2022, the OVD-Info project published a report on how the security forces use facial recognition technology to detain participants in mass rallies after the fact. In 2021, 454 people were detained in Russia after the end of rallies and actions. 363 of them – after the rally in support of Alexei Navalny, which took place on April 21.
After the announcement of the mobilization , there were reports that “evaders” were being caught on cameras in the subway.
The Russian service of the BBC wrote that the Moscow authorities are monitoring residents using four facial recognition technologies at once – they work simultaneously and compete with each other. The Moscow video surveillance system uses NtechLab, Tevian FaceSDK, VisionLabs Luna Platform and Kipod algorithms. The latter helps the Belarusian security forces find the enemies of Alexander Lukashenko.
