Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

The company has developed technology they consider unique in its capability and reach. It is able, for example, to store many millions of items of biometric data, such as voice samples and photo images, and match them to individuals by searching the world’s communication channels, including video files. The voice recognition technology can identify the speaker, regardless of language, accent, or dialect, based on physical characteristics of the voice.

In 2008 the company completed its first national voice recognition project in Mexico. The system was able to use state records of human voices and biometric details—voice, face, and other characteristics—to identify individuals, and to do it from fragments of speech alone. Mexico’s national database of voices was made up of speech fragments recorded from criminals, law enforcers, and many law-abiding citizens, who are obliged to supply vocal samples for state regulated activities, such as obtaining a driver’s license. Thus, Kopelev’s 1949 dream of creating the system that “would allow recognition of the voice in all circumstances out of any amount of voices” was realized in 2010 in Mexico. Koval was personally in charge of implementing the ambitious project. “I’ve been traveling to Mexico for seven years!” he exclaimed.

On a cold and snowy day in January 2012, in an almost empty café near Chernyshevsky Metro Station in St. Petersburg, Koval enthusiastically recalled to Andrei the story of his company. Koval proudly listed countries where his company’s speech-recognition technology was already in use: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus—all repressive authoritarian regimes in the former Soviet Union—as well as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Yemen, and Turkey.

Andrei asked Koval what he thought about the ethics of his work and the fact that regimes around the world were using his technology to suppress dissidents. He replied emotionally and with certitude and self-confidence. “All this talk about technology catching dissidents is just bullshit,” he insisted. “It’s typical of the kind of psychological warfare the Americans use against their opponents. I think all these arguments about human rights are completely hypocritical.” He expressed no reservations about the use of his technology against journalists, dissidents, and human rights campaigners. “What can we do about it?” he said. “We just come up with the hardware. It’s just technology that is developed with law enforcement in mind. Sure, you can use it against the good guys just as easily as you can use it against the bad guys. One way or another, these governments will be able to use surveillance technology, whether we supply it or not. Take, for example, face-recognition technology: you can film a demonstration, and with that film you can identify the journalists, the drug addicts, the recently released prisoners, or the nationalists. It’s all the same technology. I can’t think what can be done about that! If governments listen in on people’s conversations, it’s not the microphone’s fault!”

These exact words have been repeated over and over again by engineers who willingly served the Soviet state and then did the same thing in Russia. They believed it was not their fault. Koval’s confidence had recently been bolstered by an investment from a source even closer to Putin than the secret services could provide. In September 2011 Gazprombank acquired 35 percent of SpeechPro. Gazprombank is also part of the vast business empire of Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend of Vladimir Putin.

The Russian system of secret research appears to be reestablished completely. In Moscow, Chuchupal, now the chief of the sector on speech recognition at the Computation Center of the Academy of Sciences, continues to work on speech recognition, and Kuchino is among his customers. Both Koval’s and Chuchupal’s organizations are still working on the issue of “key words.”

Koval’s odyssey was repeated over and over again by other Soviet scientists and engineers, and it created a mindset among many of them. Loren Graham, a preeminent historian of Soviet and Russian science at MIT, told us, “Russian scientists and engineers are, on the whole, less interested in the ethical and moral problems of their work than many of their counterparts in Western countries.” [10] Loren Graham, conversations with authors, September 2013.

“Why is this so? I see two reasons,” he added. “In the Soviet period Russian scientists and engineers learned early on that if they raised ethical and moral issues that this was seen by the authorities as ‘political opposition,’ and they would be punished for raising such issues. Therefore, they learned to stay silent, and after a while this silence became ingrained and even a part of their professional definition. Of course, the Soviet Union is long gone, but these attitudes have largely continued.”

Second, he said, “Engineering education in Russia has been focused on technical issues, with very little attention to larger human, ethical, and moral questions. Although engineering education in the US has some of these characteristics also, it is worth noticing that at top engineering schools in the United States, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—my university—every student during four years of engineering study is required to take eight courses, usually one each semester, in the humanities and social sciences. These courses open up deep questions of ethics and ‘meaning,’ which are not considered in technical courses.

“This is an important part of engineering education in the best universities in Western countries,” Graham said. “It has important effects, leading to questions about the social responsibilities of scientists and engineers. And many of the best engineering schools in the United States also have departments of Science, Technology and Society [STS], where these problems are studied.”

Anatoly Levenchuk, an engineer himself who, in the early 1990s, helped launch Relcom, told us that “I tell my students not to apply system engineering when you work for the government.” Why? “It could be very dangerous. You need to know humanities to deal with the state. If you apply only engineering, you will build a prison as a result. Say you are tasked to address threats, in this case the best way to address them as engineer is to build a box, a prison, you just close everything off.” [11] Anatoly Levenchuk, interview with authors, August 2014.

Levenchuk himself ceased to cooperate with the government in 2006 and focused on teaching engineering at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the major university for training engineers for the Russian nuclear industry. Levenchuk sought to present new ideas in his classroom, challenging the traditional rigid approach and urging students to be more open-minded and aware. He was soon attacked. In April 2013 he was confronted with an old and nefarious Soviet practice—a public denunciation. An open letter was published on LiveJournal.com, accusing Levenchuk of teaching “fascist” philosophy and values. Levenchuk was accused of systematic destruction of “the Soviet school of design.” The denunciation then went on to demand that members of the State Duma to initiate a request to the General Prosecutor’s Office to check whether Levenchuk is a foreign agent, as “pro-Western ideas” are detected in his lectures. The request was duly sent, and the institute was forced to write an official reply, protecting Levenchuk. [12] Ibid.

The denunciation showed that Soviet engineers’ mindset—the rigid adherence to the technical—was resurging under Putin.

Sergei Koval, so dismissive of concerns about dissidents and human rights, took his approach overseas in 2009. It was one thing to loyally and unquestioningly serve the state in the former Soviet Union, but it was quite another to deliver the same approach to other countries and security services. Koval’s journey abroad took him to Colombia. There, on September 21, 2009, the secret police, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, or DAS, a hybrid of intelligence and law enforcement, held a press conference in Bogotá. [13] “Chuzadas no fueron hechas por el DAS: Felipe Muñoz” [Wiretappings Were Not Made by the DAS: Felipe Muñoz], Vanguardia , September 22, 2009, www.vanguardia.com/historico/40371-chuzadas-no-fueron-hechas-por-el-das-felipe-munoz .