Moscow cops sell access to city CCTV, Facial Recognition Data

Anyone with a little money can buy access to Moscow’s surveillance system of tens of thousands of cameras and check footage stored over the previous five days. Sellers on forums and messenger groups that trade illegal data also provide facial recognition lookup services.

To ensure safety in the city, there are over 175,000 CCTV cameras in Moscow, most of them installed at entrances and more than 4,000 present in crowded places. Back in 2017, the mayor’s office in Moscow stated that facial recognition technology integrated with Russia’s police databases had been activated and it was pulling data from 3,000 cameras.

The plan was to link the rest of the video surveillance to the facial recognition system. The city’s website says that the video surveillance system can be accessed by “employees of federal government bodies, the Moscow Mayor and their authorized officials, law enforcement and executive authorities.”

Investigative media outlet MBKh Media found that access to this technology and the live streams is being sold on underground forums and chat rooms. Andrey Kaganskikh, the journalist that did the investigation says that the sellers are law enforcement individuals as well as government bureaucrats that can log into the Integrated Center for Data Processing and Storage (YTKD), the very system that stores the data from cameras in Moscow.

Whoever wants to check the live stream from a camera receives a unique link to the City CCTV System that connects to all public cameras in Moscow. The URL works for five days, Kaganskikh says. This is the same period mentioned on the city’s CCTV section for storing footage from crowded places, shops, and courtyards. Data from educational organizations is saved for 30 days.

Furthermore, government officials or police officers sell their login credentials to the system to provide unlimited access to all cameras. The price of admission is 30,000 rubles ($470), according to Kaganskikh. To test the facial recognition attributes, the investigator provided a photo of himself to a seller. The search returned 238 images of people (male and female) with a similar look from 140 cameras, along with a list of addresses and times they were caught on camera.

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