City officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, announced on Thursday that the city’s closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance cameras will be upgraded with “ethnic recognition software” to “prevent social tension” by monitoring “the formation of ethnic enclaves.”
According to Oleg Kaptianov, a top official for “interethnic relations” in the St. Petersburg municipal government, the city spent $434,000 buying “ethnic recognition software” from a vendor he declined to identify. The software will interface with about 8,000 of the city’s 102,000 cameras when the system is up and running.
The Moscow Times strongly suspected the unnamed vendor would turn out to be a Chinese company. China long ago designed image-scanning systems that can identify the ethnic background of people in a crowd.
The Chinese government uses these systems to monitor the movement of oppressed peoples such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans. One of the first “Uyghur Alert” facial recognition systems was developed with the assistance of telecom giant Huawei. The software was coded to notify the police whenever security cameras spotted a Uyghur in a city where the Chinese Communist Party did not want them.
China faced international outrage when it rolled out the first generation of ethnic recognition software and it responded with arguments similar to those made by St. Petersburg.
“The functionality will allow for more accurate forecasting of the need for resources to ensure order and security during mass events, and optimize the involvement of volunteers and law enforcement officers who speak different languages,” city officials told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper.
The head of Russia’s Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, Valery Fadeyev, countered that St. Petersburg police already know where the city’s “ethnic enclaves” are located.
“In Russia, nationality is not even indicated in the passport, and suddenly some television cameras will determine what nationality a person belongs to,” Fadeyev observed.
Other critics questioned the effectiveness of ethnic recognition software, in addition to its ethical problems.
“It’s not very clear how [ethnicity] could be determined purely through a recording, without direct communication with individuals. That’s where my questions lie,” said Konstantin Zatulin, first deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Affairs.
“This initiative is a mistake – it only fuels tensions and interethnic discord. Ethically, it raises serious questions about the competence of those in government positions,” said Alexandra Dokuchaeva, deputy director of the Institute of CIS Countries.
Independent news website Meduza suggested St. Petersburg officials are especially concerned about immigrants from Tajikistan, and perhaps eager to give the impression they are keeping a close eye on the Tajik population.
Tajik nationals were accused of perpetrating the gun attack on a concert at the Crocus City Hall in a suburb of Moscow in March 2024. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for ordering the attack, which killed 115 people.
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