The War on Terrorism: Medvedev Takes Putin’s Path
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
April 8, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In the week that has passed since the bombings on the city metro, President Dmitri Medvedev has actively intruded upon Putin’s personal domain – which the war on terrorism is considered to be – and proposed a few solutions. Clearly, they should demonstrate that his approach to this problem differs from the last one, which, considering what happened, has obviously not proven its worth. Today there are three initiatives – a presidential decree regarding transportation safety, the appointment of a new security force in the North Caucasus, and the introduction of a scale of terrorist threats.

The decree entitled “On the creation of a complex system to provide safety to the population on transportation” calls for the creation of a system to prevent emergency situations and terrorist attacks, most of all in the metro. Judging by the text, this would involve equipping public transportation with special technology to deal with “acts of unlawful interference,” and also systems to collect information about emerging emergency situations and threats of terrorist attacks. That is to say, additional systems to monitor passengers, and also all possible devices to determine the presence of poisonous, toxic, or other malicious agents in the air.

According to the document, the most vulnerable facilities should be equipped with this special technology by the end of next March, and the entire safety system should be completed by 2014.

Insofar as this is the only open document adopted after the bombings in the metro, one can make the conclusion that the state is intent on investing funds to prevent terrorist attacks at the last stage – when a terrorist with a bomb or poisonous gas cartridge is already moving toward a goal and falls into view of technical or other systems of control.

Meanwhile, it’s entirely obvious that cameras and censors don’t help to stop terrorists in the middle of a crowd in the metro or in a train station; at the very least, there have been no such examples of this happening in the past ten years. Moreover, as Russian experience has shown, barriers can be an obstacle to entering a defined area, but they won’t hinder a terrorist from detonating a suicide bomb in a crowd of people. At the Krylya festival in Tushino, a suicide bomber was unable to enter the stadium and blew herself up in the line at the barrier.

Of course, video cameras can help to quickly establish the identity of a suicide bomber, and, it’s true, that turns out to be helpful in the search for the terrorist’s accomplices; although, recently, as a general rule, they skillfully disguise themselves, covering up with caps and using glasses to change how their faces look. But none of this has anything to do with preventing a terrorist attack itself, and, at best, eases the investigation of a tragedy that has already happened.

In London, the world’s most developed video surveillance system (official figures say that Great Britain has one camera for every twelve people) couldn’t prevent the underground and bus terrorist attacks in 2005, although, as consequently became clear, the terrorists fell into view of the cameras numerous times on their way to the sites of the explosions and as they made preparations for the attacks.

British police already admit that all of this technology is practically useless even against normal crime, let alone terrorist attacks. The head of video surveillance management at Scotland Yard, Mick Neville, said at a 2008 press conference that less than one of every thirty crimes is uncovered with the help of CCTV – with its help, but not thanks to it exclusively.

Moreover, for understandable reasons, the metro and above-ground transportation in large cities cannot be equipped with the same safety measures that are used in airports (barriers, x-rays, all possible kinds of detectors). The head of the city metro, Dmitri Gayev, has spoken about this numerous times in the past few days.

The second initiative announced after the Moscow terrorist attacks was the scale of terrorist threats, which the National Anti-terroristt Committee is intent on introducing – not the same type that was introduced in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It’s obvious that this scale is meant first and foremost for the population, since the intelligence agencies already have their own internal plan of action for any terrorist threats that show up. For example, before the 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the threat level was decreased. Moreover, experience has shown that raising the threat level only increases the nervousness of the population. Normal people who aren’t trained to identify dangerous behavioral indicators are inclined to see them in everyone that looks or behaves “just not right.” This, naturally, leads to a growth in suspiciousness and xenophobia. At the same time, the intelligence agencies wind up swamped with a humongous quantity of garbage information that they’re required to respond to.

Medvedev’s third step was a staffing decision in the North Caucasus. Having visited Dagestan, the president appointed Deputy Chief of Internal Forces Yevgeny Lazebin, who head the United Group of Federal Forces in 2005-06, as the supervisor of the Internal Ministry in the North Caucasus.

All three of these decisions proposed by Medvedev in the wake of the terrorist attacks have one quality in common: they are a direct continuation of the strategy formed by Putin in the beginning and middle of the last decade.

The Internal Ministry has been investing funds in a system to control the population, including with video surveillance, since at least 2005. The scale of terrorist threats has been the beloved brainchild of Nikolai Patrushev even since during his tenure as FSB director, and they’ve been trying to introduce it since 2004. However, while the effect of these two initiatives is simply doubtful, the appointment of an Interior Forces general belongs in a separate category.

The Kremlin began to systematically move the Interior Forces into the main role in the North Caucasus back in the middle of the last decade. Back then, the highest-rated terrorist threat was an attack on a city by large detachments of militants, as happened in 2004 when Basayev’s detachment took control of Nazran within nearly twenty-four hours. Therefore, the main task was considered as having heavily armed detachments of special forces on hand to deflect an attack and carry out tactical operations in the city or forest.

In appointing Lazebin, Medvedev has shown that he continues to consider attacks by powerful militants to be the most dangerous threat. It’s obvious that such an approach has nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks by suicide bombers, which most of all demand intelligence work – not the Interior Forces’ strongest point.

Moreover, Medvedev’s choice demonstrates that the Kremlin isn’t planning to even begin a battle for “the hearts and minds” of the North Caucasus. The interior forces have a fully developed reputation in the region. There are no such words that could convince the local population to enter into cooperation with the crimson berets. But this scarcely worried Putin, and as is becoming clear, doesn’t interest Medvedev even a bit.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

As it turns out, the Russian police are creating databases used to the track the movements of law-abiding citizens.  The project is overseen by a new department for countering extremism within the Russian police, but often targeted at individuals for no reason other than their political views or activism.

Journalist Irina Borogan documents these “black lists” in the third in a series of articles documenting the government campaign to battle extremism and strengthen control over the public.  The series is a joint project between the Yezhednevny Zhurnal online newspaper and the Agentura.ru web portal, which specializes in investigating Russia’s intelligence agencies.

Previous articles have focused on the nature of the new anti-extremism department of the Russian police and have questioned why emphasis has shifted from battling organized crime to extremism.  The next article will examine electronic surveillance systems and their use to control the behavior of groups of people.

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The Kremlin’s Anti-Crisis Package:  How and Why “Black Lists” Are Made
Irina Borogan
June 2, 2009
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

Since the spring of this year, thousands of policemen throughout the entire country have been forced to engage in the search for extremists.  It is already plain to see that there aren’t enough extremists to go around:  according to the Ministry of Internal Affair’s [MVD] Central Informational-Analytical Center (GIATs), in 2008, there were 379 people in Russia identified for committing “extremist” crimes.  For a whole Department of the MVD, which has units (the E centers) in nearly every region, this is clearly insufficient.  Which means that the number of extremists must be supplemented.  But doing this legally, through the courts, will be difficult: in the last year, the courts refused to recognize extremist motives in nearly half of all cases, and the cases fell apart.

In such a situation, the policemen will need to work on “preventing” crimes, as Minister [Rashid] Nurgaliev is constantly calling on them to do.  And this calls for different methods for the tacit surveillance of suspects: tapping telephones, opening and inspecting mail, monitoring travel within the country and outside its borders, and so forth.  But first, the circle of people suspected of extremism must be determined, designating the people whose potential crime consists of spreading radical views or simply points of view that don’t coincide with the views of authorities.

The fact that these “black” lists of citizens exist has not only been expressed by human rights activists, but by policemen themselves as they report on the work they have done.  But now one can confidently assert that there is secret surveillance and data gathering being conducted on the citizen who ended up on such a list.  And this has recently been deemed lawful.

Details that emerged in court

In April 2009, when [authorities] announced that the creation of anti-extremist units in the country was completed, a court ruled lawful the MVD’s tracking of the movements of Sergey Shimovolos, which was done on order from the local UBOP (now – the Center for Countering Extremism).  During the trial, it came to light that 3,865 Russians were under this type of surveillance in 2007.

All of these people, including Sergey Shimovolos, the chair of the Nizhny-Novgorod Human Rights Society, were put on a police list, and a so-called “watchdog surveillance” (storozhevoy kontrol).  Now, their names come up in the very same electronic card files that have data on criminals on the wanted list.

The assumption that the militsiya and FSB were creating “black lists” of political and social activists emerged several years ago.  People began to notice that not a single trip to a public function, whether a “March of Dissent” or a human rights conference, happened without problems from the police.  Moreover, people in uniform sometimes sprang up at nearly every stop along the social activist’s whole itinerary.

In May 2007, for instance, when Sergey Shimovolos was making his way from Nizhny Novgorod to Samara in order to conduct an independent investigation of restrictions put on protests during the G-8 summit, he was checked three times: in the Nizhny Novgorod and Samara Oblasts, as well as mid-trip – in the Republic of Mordovia.  Each time, an officer of the transit police asked him to explain where he was headed and what he planned to do there.  Clearly, the checks were planned and initiated, and notably in three regions at once.  But how?

“In Samara I was lucky: the policemen honestly wrote in the report, that they detained me on the grounds a telegram (teletypogram) they received, and had to question me in line with crime prevention measures for conducting protest actions,” Sergey Shimovolos told the Yezhednevny Zhurnal.  Afterward, through court, I received materials that bore witness to the fact that I was put under “watchdog surveillance” by a decision of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast UBOP [Organized Crime Unit], which allowed them to strategically monitor my movements through the ticket sales database.”

Shimovolos decided to protest his surveillance in court.  He asked the court to recognize that these measures violate a person’s rights, and to compel the MVD to destroy all records of him and all citizens who had not been deemed to be extremists by a court, but had still been entered into this database.  On April 22, 2009, the Nizhny Novgorod District Court refused the human rights activist on all counts.

What is “watchdog surveillance”

Shimovolos lost, but thanks to his lawsuit, we learned how the system of surveillance over law-abiding citizens is carried out.

Information about Shimovolos made its way into the “Rozysk-magistral” (“Wanted Line”) electronic database of the Russian Federation MVD on March 19, 2007.  The decision to include his information into the database was made by officers in the UBOP GUVD for the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, based upon strategic reasons that comprise a state secret, in the opinion of the police.  Shimovolos himself assumes this happened because he was among the organizers of a “March of Dissent” in Nizhny Novgorod.

Having put Shimovolos’s details into the “Wanted Line” database, the policemen put him on “watchdog surveillance:” one type of record that exists to track someone’s movements.

At first, the MVD’s “Wanted Line” hardware and software suite (PTK) was created to automatically assist in the search for criminals on the federal and local wanted lists.  The PTK is “linked” to the “Express” and “Magistral” databases, which constantly receive information about train and airline tickets purchased by Russians.  When a criminal buys a ticket, the information makes its way into the PTK server.  Next, this information is communicated to the local transport police (OVD), located along the itinerary of the passenger train and in airports.  The objective is clear – the arrest of the criminal.

At the same time, data about law-abiding citizens, like Shimovolos, were introduced into the PTK.  They were then put on “watchdog surveillance.”  The whole procedure is the same, except that instead of an arrest, policemen receive instructions of what kind of work they must conduct with the citizens who are not suspected of a criminal offense.*

The Yezhednevny Zhurnal received further proof of how this system works from Roman Dobrokhotov, a participant in the “For Human Rights” movement.  On May 6, 2009, Dobrokhotov came by train from Volgograd to the capital’s Paveletsky Rail Terminal, where he was detained by a policeman waiting for him by the rail car’s exit.  The UVD officer was ordered to have a preventative talk with him.  As it turned out, Dobrokhotov was arrested on the basis of an [official] message, which spelled out in black and white how the Center for Investigative Information of the Moscow UVD for Transport reported that Dobrokhotov was put on “watchdog surveillance” by the Department for Countering Extremism of the RF MVD.

As result, the efforts of at least three police units were expended to track Dobrokhotov’s route.  The activist has never been indicted on criminal charges, but has taken part in different non-systemic political movements.

New technologies

As far as one can judge from the circumstances of Dobrokhotov’s arrest, it was conducted in the old way, without the use of ultra-modern technologies that the MVD already has at its disposal.  Such as, for instance, the portable terminal of the very same “Wanted Line” PTK: externally, it resembles a smartphone, weighing less than 200 grams, but in addition to text information, it can transmit photo and video-images.  This pocket device is designed to give militsiya officers real-time access to federal and regional databases like “Wanted persons,” “Passports,” “Weapons,” “Theft,” “Automotive Transport Wanted by Interpol,” and others.

As the manufacturers report in the technical manual, this pocket terminal has access to the nearest database server in real-time over existing communication channels, which allows for the broadcast of digital information, including the use of WEB-technology.

Aside from that, practically every large rail terminal and airport in Russia, as well as a part of trains and commuter trains, are equipped with “Videolock” face recognition systems – with cameras in rail cars, waiting rooms, cash registers and on platforms.  In principle, Dobrokhotov could well have been detained with the help of such a system.  A policeman could have received his image, marked with a special symbol, on the hand-held console.

***

In such a way, the MVD Department for Countering Extremism is at present forming “black lists.”  Data is added to them on the basis of “strategic reasons,” that are not even revealed in court.  Having gotten on these lists, citizens end up under the microscope of electronic surveillance systems of travel which were created to capture actual criminals.  Furthermore, a court has found this type of actions to be absolutely legal.

* – “watchdog surveillance” is also used by the Court Bailiffs Service to search for debtors, and the FSKN [Federal Drug Control Service] to track the movements of suspected drug couriers.

translation by theotherrussia.org