Russian Hi-Tech Spy Apps for Facial Recognition & Cell Phone Interception
Russian hi-tech spy devices under attack over privacy
fears
By Germain Moyon June 5, 2016
Russian technologies, including phonecall interception
and a facial recognition app, have stirred a fierce debate about privacy and
data monitoring.
Infowatch, a Moscow-based IT security company managed by
businesswoman Natalya Kasperskaya, found itself in hot water last month after
it revealed it had invented a system that companies can use to intercept
employees' mobile phone conversations.
Companies outside Russia have also devised call
interception software, and Infowatch already markets products that monitor
employees' e-mails, USB keys and printers.
But Kasperskaya says she was taken aback by the storm
that surrounded the mobile phone innovation.
"We weren't expecting this. For us it was only
another channel of communication," Kasperskaya told AFP in an interview.
The Russian authorities and members of the public lashed
the invention as a breach of law or infringement of privacy.
Infowatch traces its origins back to 1997, when
Kasperskaya and her then-husband, now divorced, Eugene Kaspersky co-founded the
Kaspersky Lab security software company, which has gone on to global success.
The goal behind phonecall interception, Kasperskaya said,
is to provide large businesses with a tool to prevent information leaks,
including companies whose success depends on protecting corporate secrets.
Communications minister Nikolai Nikiforov said a court
ruling was needed to get permission to tap phones.
The speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, Sergei
Naryshkin, said he feared such technologies could be used to malicious ends.
Facing objections from the authorities, the company has
refrained from designing a voice recognition system, even though there is
demand from sensitive sectors including banking, the oil industry and large
public companies.
Monitoring of communications by private corporations
touches a nerve in a country where the shadowy KGB security service once
monitored dissidents and where the state is keen to retain its grip on
citizens' personal data.
The KGB's post-Soviet successor, the FSB, has long used a
sophisticated system called SORM to carry out surveillance communications by
telephone or on the Internet.
The revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden showed
that the US National Security Agency also carries out surveillance on a mass
scale.
Human rights advocacy group Agora has said that nine
million Russians, including opposition figures and political activists, have
come under state surveillance since 2007.
Their mobiles have been taped, their e-mails read and
their movements tracked by what Agora calls a "political policing instrument."
Infowatch has tried to assuage concerns, insisting its
new system is still at a preliminary stage.
The company said that only a restricted number of
telephone lines will be targeted and monitored with the employee's consent.
The monitoring is done by software that picks out key
words from the phone conversations, it said.
"We have to prove that our system does not
constitute phone tapping. We would by no means release on the market a system
that does not respect the law," Kasperskaya said.
In any case, Kasperskaya observed, new technologies are
nudging us toward a world where there are "no secrets."
- Finding faces -
Another debate has been stirred by a new Russian
smartphone app known as FindFace.
It allows users to photograph strangers on the street and
identify their pages on social network site VK, Russia's equivalent of
Facebook, which hosts 350 million accounts.
The app has had staggering success, with a million
downloads since it was made available in February.
In half a second, the app can peruse a database of 300
million pictures and match one to a stranger's photograph, said one of the
creators, 26-year-old Artyom Kukharenko, who co-founded Moscow's NTechLaB.
But in its first few weeks, the app has already brewed
controversy.
Some users used it to identify the VK page of a porn
actress and bombarded her with threatening messages.
On the other hand, police caught arsonists who set fire
to a Saint Petersburg construction site after identifying their images on security
camera footage using FindFace.
"This is a demonstration of our technology,"
Kukharenko told AFP, adding that his app had garnered interest from companies
throughout the globe.
"The real use of the algorithm will be for security
services, banks, distributors and for leisure activities," as well as for
dating services and those who wish to meet strangers they saw on the street or
even someone who just looks similar, he said.
IT security specialist Mikhail Yemelyannikov told AFP
that FindFace does not violate any existing legislation because the social
media pages it trawls contain pictures with unrestricted access.
"The problems start later: what will the result be
used for?" he said. "Legislation will never evolve as fast as
technology."
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