The Moscow City Hall spent 500 billion rubles from the budget on surveillance of citizens

About 500 billion rubles were allocated from the Moscow budget for the collection and analysis of data from Muscovites for the period 2012-2020, the calculated BBC Russian Service based on reports from the mayor's office on the implementation of the Information City program. The technical capabilities for monitoring compliance with the self-isolation regime are only a small part of the Smart City system organized over the past decade.

The system built by the city authorities can find phone numbers, email addresses, comments on social networks and much more. Its creation was supervised by the team of Artem Ermolaev, who headed the Moscow Committee of Information Technologies (now the department). According to the BBC, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin knew Ermolaev from his work on the federal government services portal, and Singapore was chosen as a reference point for Moscow.

By 2018, Moscow ranked first in the top 40 cities in the world with the highest level of e-government according to the UN.
Now the Moscow mayor's office has about 170 different information systems. In official documents, they go under abbreviations like SPPRIUIR, AMiPM or KIASOUMM.
SPPRIUIR automatically monitors the media and social networks in search of mentions of the mayor and members of the capital's government and is engaged in the definition of "media risks".
AMiPM serves as a personal Google Calendar for Sobyanin, through which he can plan a schedule, correspond with assistants and check whether his subordinates have read the latest publications about their activities.

Surveillance through cellular operators

The main "raw" data in the system comes from mobile operators.

Location information is combined with content consumed and services received, from issuing a passport to going to the doctor.
To obtain information about the actual place of residence, since 2015, the mayor's office has been purchasing geoanalytical data from mobile operators. Since 2015, more than 700 million rubles have been allocated from the Moscow budget for this.
Having this information, the mayor's office, for example, warns residents of a particular area about the closure of the metro stations closest to them or calculates how many people leave for the summer to live in summer cottages and travel abroad.
Data can be aggregated by age and other parameters. But sending sms to passengers of “coronavirus” flights about the need for self-isolation is no longer automatically possible: interaction with the police is needed.

Surveillance through transport companies

The data is transmitted by Yandex.Taxi, Citymobil, Vezet and Gett, and traffic on Moscow streets is reported by the Traffic Management Center (TsODD), subordinated to Deptrans.

These data are combined with information from GLONASS sensors installed on public transport - buses, trams and trolleybuses of Mosgortrans, as well as on harvesting equipment.
In 2015, Caesar-Satellite, a manufacturer of anti-theft systems, provided data on the movement of cars around the city, but now does not disclose them.
With the participation of the traffic police, the Autocode system works to track the registration of any vehicle and the presence of fines.

Surveillance on the Internet

Since 2019, the management of all Wi-Fi points has been united in the hands of the Maximatelecom operator, which has been providing Wi-Fi in the Moscow metro since 2013.

The city's Wi-Fi network uses a deep traffic analysis (DPI) system, which means that the Moscow authorities are aware of the specific sites and applications that users use.
“Portraits” of users are compiled based on what exactly they do and look for on the network. All those who connected to the free city Wi-Fi are grouped according to socio-demographic characteristics - gender, age, family composition, the presence of a car, and even according to “life situations”. Despite the impersonality, portraits can be as detailed as possible.
Information from mos.ru and related resources such as Active Citizen or Our City is analyzed.
For its own resources (including mos.ru), since 2017, the mayor’s office has been developing a user activity analysis system “STATS”. This system identifies the user even with disabled cookies, even coming from different browsers, based on fingerprint technology (characteristics of the user's hardware).

The technology works: a BBC correspondent went to the Active Citizen website for the first time for a few seconds without any action, and the next day received a letter to the personal mail specified during registration in the metropolitan public services system.

Surveillance through cameras

By the beginning of 2020, the city's video surveillance system united 175,000 cameras connected to a single data storage and processing center (ETsHD). In the near future - to increase their number to 200 thousand. The cameras are installed on the streets, in institutions, clinics, markets and schools.

Moscow has widely implemented face recognition technology based on technology from NTechLab, which developed FindFace, a portal that is not currently working to search for people on VKontakte by image.
The NTechLab neural network allows you to detect four out of five wanted people whose faces have at least once been recorded by at least one camera, and the search time for a person in a database of 1 billion images takes no more than 10 seconds, follows from the company's presentation.
In an interview with The Bell, co-founder of the service Alexander Kabakov said that the algorithm recognizes a face, even if a person uses glasses, a mustache or a beard to disguise.
Now it processes several tens of millions of faces per day, it is almost impossible to bypass it.
Since 2015, all conversations of citizens with employees of the unified city dispatch service have been recorded and then automatically decoded into text, and also evaluated by algorithms in terms of the "emotional background of the conversation." Perhaps, it is planned to install sensitive street microphones, with which it will be possible to compare voice recordings.