"Quarantine compliance will be checked through surveillance cameras." "Surveillance cameras will help identify violators." "Surveillance cameras will know it's you, even if you're wearing a mask."
Almost every news story about life under quarantine now mentions that surveillance is total and that Big Brother is watching us.
Well then, let's talk about it.
Anyone who has lived in Moscow has seen cameras like these at apartment building entrances:
These are not just cameras — they are one of Sergei Sobyanin's proudest achievements. It's called the "Moscow video surveillance system." There are currently about 200,000 cameras installed, 100,000 of them specifically at apartment building entrances. Here is a map of the cameras from the Moscow mayor's office website; on it, every residential district of Moscow now looks like this:
These neighborhoods are absolutely packed with cameras. It is impossible to enter a building without being caught on camera. The description on the mayor's office website explicitly states that the cameras are installed at average human height — 170 cm (1.7 meters) — specifically to capture the faces of people entering the building. The footage is sent to the Moscow mayor's office servers and stored there.
Originally, the system was created to catch criminals: if someone stole a TV from an apartment, they could be tracked through the cameras and found. But in 2019, without any public discussion whatsoever, it began turning into a system of total control over Muscovites. Sobyanin said it would be linked to facial recognition algorithms, and in Putin's presence he openly boasted that such a system "would be one of the largest in the world, rivaled perhaps only by Chinese systems." The principle is simple: you walk up to your building entrance, and the system knows it is you. It knows where you live, what time you walk your dog, and when you come home from work. Any local police officer can upload your photo into the system and find out whose place you visit on Fridays. And this system has become one of Sobyanin's favorite projects — he praises it at every opportunity.
The cameras are now being used to monitor people under quarantine. Every day there are news reports about someone being fined for taking out the trash.
Of course, since the system is run by Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor's office, and accessible to Moscow police, its data can be bought online. Journalists ran an experiment and managed to find a person's home address using camera data for just a few thousand rubles. You can buy the data right now — the archive from any camera can be yours for very little money. So the data from the digital collars Sobyanin has strapped onto us is available to any random lowlife. Here is one of them posting footage from a camera mounted at the entrance to Georgy Alburov's building two weeks ago.
But besides being completely for sale, this system has another remarkable feature: it is designed so that no senior official, security officer, or member of parliament ever ends up on it. Because cameras are simply never installed on their buildings. Your entrance in Chertanovo, Butovo, or Yasenevo will be covered in cameras like a Christmas tree in lights, but the buildings where top officials live will have none. Sobyanin made sure of that. Don't believe it? Look: an ordinary residential district in Moscow, everything covered in cameras — three or four per building, one at each entrance.
And here is the building at 3 Shvedsky Tupik, where Sechin's children, Gennady Timchenko, Sergei Lavrov, Ernst, and Kudrin live. It has 0 cameras installed.
Here is the building that contains the 1,600-square-meter penthouse of Pyotr Biryukov, Sobyanin's deputy for housing and utilities. Somehow there were no cameras left for that one either.
3 Maly Kozikhinsky Lane is the building where State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and former Pension Fund head Anton Drozdov live. 0 cameras.
Here is the building where Prime Minister Mishustin's children own an entire floor. Every building around it is covered in cameras, but this one has none.
And what about Sergei Sobyanin's own building? Surely the architect of this surveillance system for Muscovites put at least one camera on his own home — if only for appearances' sake. He did not. At 12 Rochdelskaya Street — where camera enthusiast Sobyanin lives, along with former Prosecutor General Chaika, Constitutional Court chairman Zorkin, the family of Alexander Beglov, and many other distinguished residents — the number of entrance cameras installed is 0.
I'll tell you more: there is an entire neighborhood in Moscow full of officials that the cameras have simply bypassed. It's called Ostozhenka, or the Golden Mile. There is nothing more expensive in Moscow. This is where Andrei Kostin gave apartments to Nailya Asker-Zade, where a lawmaker and Senator Fetisov have a 1,000-square-meter apartment, and where Igor Sechin's five-story apartment is located. Sobyanin chose not to install cameras on their buildings.
See that one lone building in the upper-right corner? In the entire ultra-elite Golden Mile, that was the only one they had enough cameras for. Apparently Sobyanin looked at it, was horrified by such poverty, decided there definitely were no officials living there, and put cameras on it.
What does all this mean? It means that Sobyanin, fully understanding how his illegal surveillance system for Muscovites works, deliberately chose not to apply it to the most privileged among them — officials and Putin's friends. He knows his subordinates are so corrupt that they would sell any entrance-camera recording featuring Sobyanin himself for 2,000 rubles. A recording of Andrei Kostin walking into a building arm in arm with Nailya Asker-Zade would cost a bit more — 2,500 rubles. And for 3,000, they would probably hand over all of Alina Kabaeva's movements as well. Just imagine it: you have a photo of someone like Mishustin, you give it along with a couple thousand rubles to some unknown person on the internet, and five minutes later you receive every address where he appears. With separate notes on where he lives and where he goes once a week in the evenings. An investigator's paradise. Sobyanin understands this, which is why he built a digital camp for you, while graciously switching it off for himself and the rest of Putin's corrupt cronies.
We demand equal treatment from Sobyanin. So, Sergei Semyonovich, if you have put cameras at the entrance of every Muscovite's building, then put them on your own officials' building on Rochdelskaya as well. And on all the other elite buildings where millionaire officials live.
And I urge everyone else to take part in Smart Voting (a tactical voting campaign in Russia). It's time to drive the hypocrites of United Russia out of their comfortable official chairs.