VisionLabs’ executive Anton Nazarkin told Reuters the company provides facial recognition to Moscow via a third party, which he declined to name. He said VisionLabs’ algorithm has been used in Moscow’s facial recognition system since it was rolled out across the capital during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which Russia hosted, and is also used in the metro’s voluntary Face Pay payment system. Nazarkin said he was not aware of the company’s technology being used in other ways in the metro. MTS did not respond to a request for comment.
An NtechLab spokesperson said that as of 2022, the Moscow metro no longer uses the firm’s technology. He declined to go into detail about its wider deployment in the capital, citing a non-disclosure agreement. He noted, however, that software is independently managed by the customer.
Tevian did not respond to requests for comment.
Contracts published in 2022 on Russia’s state tender website provide further technical details about the capital’s facial recognition system. They show Moscow uses VisionLabs’ Luna Platform, NtechLab’s FindFace and Tevian’s FaceSDK, as well as facial recognition software called Kipod, made by Synesis, a Belarusian company. Synesis is under American, EU and British sanctions for its role in suppressing pro-democracy movements in Belarus and Russia. Synesis has rejected the sanctions as “unfounded.” It didn’t comment for this article.
To speed image-matching, NtechLab and VisionLabs have turned to U.S. technology. Both firms have used graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, according to Nvidia’s website. GPUs are powerful chips originally designed to improve image rendering in video games.
Nazarkin, the VisionLabs executive, told Reuters that Nvidia GPUs are the “industry standard” for training a facial recognition system to accurately identify images. “Pretty much any company out there that is doing any kind of AI application is utilising Nvidia GPUs,” said Nazarkin in a phone interview from Moscow.
In a statement to Reuters, Nvidia said it halted sales to Russia in March 2022 after the U.S. imposed extensive export controls and sanctions but cannot track every downstream use of its products. A spokesperson said Nvidia had a brief engagement with VisionLabs and NtechLab that concluded before February 2022.
Russian customs records show that at least 129 shipments of Nvidia products reached Russia via third parties between April 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, however. Records for at least 57 of these shipments stated that they contained GPUs. In response to these findings, the spokesperson said, “We comply with all applicable laws, and insist our customers do the same. If we learn that any Nvidia customer has violated U.S. export laws and shipped our products to Russia, we will cease doing business with them.”
“I realised that I needed to leave Russia as quickly as I could”
Facial recognition algorithms also run on high-speed central processing units (CPUs), the chips that provide the processing power a computer needs to complete its tasks.
A document that appeared on Intel’s website as recently as October last year said Synesis, the Belarusian firm, tested Intel technology in 2019 and was using Intel CPUs to improve the performance of its Kipod platform “for law enforcement.”
The European Union and Britain sanctioned Synesis in December 2020, saying Kipod was used to track and repress civil-society and pro-democracy activists in Belarus. Synesis has called the assertions “absurd.” After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced it too was sanctioning Synesis because Russian and Belarusian authorities were using the firm’s video surveillance system to persecute protesters.
Intel told Reuters that its sales in Russia for over a decade have been through distributors that are required to comply with U.S. export controls. It said it suspended all shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Reuters has previously reported that at least $457 million worth of Intel products arrived in Russia between April 1 and Oct. 31, 2022, according to Russian customs records. “We take reports of continued availability of our products seriously and we are looking into the matter,” an Intel spokesperson said.
Rights in peril
To be sure, the Russian and Belarusian companies began using Western technology before the latest export restrictions were imposed. But as far back as 2009, Intel joined the United Nations Global Compact that says companies should not be complicit in human rights violations. Nvidia joined the compact in 2022. In its human rights policy, Nvidia says it endorses the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which require companies to mitigate the risk that their products could be used for rights abuses. Intel’s human rights policy also says it embodies the U.N. principles.
In response to Reuters findings, seven lawyers said the use of facial recognition against protesters and activists in Moscow likely constitutes human rights violations.
Klara Polackova Van der Ploeg, head of the Business, Trade and Human Rights Unit at the University of Nottingham’s Human Rights Law Centre, said, “An appropriate process for those companies would be to know who their business partners are, learn how their products are used, and exercise leverage to prevent their technology from being utilised in violations of human rights.” Intel and Nvidia declined to comment on this point.
The Russian and Belarusian firms have previously had some contact with U.S. government agencies. All have taken part in facial recognition tests by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, documents show. In 2017, NtechLab received two prizes worth a total of $25,000 in a facial recognition contest organised and funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community. Two years later, NtechLab won a $15,000 second-place prize in another IARPA technology challenge.
“Participation in the assessment does not indicate NIST approval of the business or other practices of any participant,” NIST told Reuters in an email. An IARPA spokesperson said its work requires it to maintain awareness of the world’s leading innovations and that awards do not signal government endorsement.
The CEOs and founders of VisionLabs, NtechLab and Tevian are now on a list of people who jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation believes should be sanctioned. The foundation points to the companies’ involvement in Moscow’s video surveillance system, which it says is used to persecute political activists. The companies did not respond to questions about their inclusion on the list.
Under observation
The preventive detentions, coupled with other pressure from police, so upended the lives of some of its targets, they say they felt driven to leave Russia.
Luba Krutenko, a 32-year-old architect who was in police sights because of two prior arrests for protesting, said police showed up at her home seven or eight times in March and April last year. In early March, they came three times in two days.
“They were just giving me warnings, documents saying that I shouldn’t go to rallies and if I go, a criminal case could be opened,” she said.
She stopped answering the door to avoid the encounters. Then they began to call her.
