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Anyone with a little money can buy access to Moscow’s surveillance system of tens of thousands of cameras along and check footage stored over the previous five days.

Sellers on forums and messenger groups that trade illegal data also provide facial recognition lookup services.

City-wide surveillance To ensure safety in the city, there are over 175,000 CCTV cameras in Moscow, most of them installed at entrances and more than 4,000 present in crowded places.

Back in 2017, the mayor’s office in Moscow stated that facial recognition technology integrated with Russia’s police databases had been activated and it was pulling data from 3,000 cameras.

The plan was to link the rest of the video surveillance to the facial recognition system.

“Restricted” access Investigative media outlet MBKh Media found that access to this technology and the live streams is being sold on underground forums and chat rooms.

Andrey Kaganskikh, the journalist that did the investigation says that the sellers are law enforcement individuals as well as government bureaucrats that can log into the Integrated Center for Data Processing and Storage (YTKD), the very system that keeps the data from cameras in Moscow.

Whoever wants to check the live stream from a camera receives a unique link to the City CCTV System that connects to all public cameras in Moscow. The URL works for five days, Kaganskikh says.

Furthermore, government officials or police officers sell their login credentials to the system to provide unlimited access to all cameras. The price of admission is 30,000 rubles ($470), according to Kaganskikh.

“We managed to find the cameras from the file at the indicated addresses – their angles coincided with the pictures, the camera indices and the camera indices from the open registry also coincided” – Andrey Kaganskikh

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