Russia deploys surveillance tool called "Orwell"

Russia has just rolled out new facial recognition technology in many schools across the country, with plans to expand it to nearly 43,000 establishments. Its name: “Orwell”, a marked reference to the author of the cult novel 1984 who rightly denounced this drift.

Credit: Parker Coffman via Unsplash

Early June, IBM announced that it wanted to get rid of its facial recognition technology, which has been widely debated for several years. Facial recognition indeed raises many fears as to its use in the context of general surveillance of the population, and all the more so at the moment given the risk of ethnic discrimination that it can generate. This is why its use is widely debated today across the Atlantic, so that companies like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM have asked Congress to establish rules to regulate its use and limit abuses.

But while the debate rages in the West, in the East, Russia has just introduced a new facial recognition tool, and even baptized it … Orwell, in reference to the author of the famous novel 1984, which warned us precisely against this future of generalized surveillance. As indicated The Next Web, which relays the Moscow Times, the device has just been installed in more than 1600 schools in the country in order to monitor and ensure the safety of students, but also of their teachers, and to verify that no intruder has entered the establishment. The system was developed by the company Rusnano, with the support of the Russian state, which ensures that the data collected by this facial recognition system will be stored on local servers, only if the parents of students give their consent. As the name suggests, this facial recognition system is expected to spread to Russia afterwards. “Orwell” should thus be installed in nearly 43,000 Russian schools, with an estimated budget of 25.4 million dollars. The initiative is part of the project to digitize the Russia claimed by Vladimir Putin, with a total budget of 25 billion dollars.