Officially, it is about combating violations of Russian law, but most importantly, this tool marks a new stage in web surveillance.
Russian censorship has a new tool. Roskomnadzor, the media and telecoms police officer, announced on Monday February 13 that he had deployed a system called “Okulus” to automatically track images broadcast online. This software, developed at the request of the Main Radio Frequency Center, a service under the supervision of Roskomnadzor, will speed up the targeting of visual content that violates Russian legislation: extremist theses, calls for illegal demonstrations, incitement to suicide and drug use, and LGBT propaganda.
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“This announcement marks a step forward in massing censorship with automation of control,” comments Kevin Limonier, lecturer at the French Institute of Geopolitics. Based on a network of neurons trained by automatic learning, Okulus mobilizes about fifty servers equipped with graphics accelerators. It analyzes websites and profiles on social networks in order to classify them according to predefined criteria.
“Russian censorship is still carried out under the guise of a virtuous struggle. Officially, Twitter is slowed down or blocked for child pornography stories.”
Kevin Limonier, Lecturer at the French Institute of Geopolitics
at franceinfo
This system was first tested in December before being integrated with the monitoring tools already used by Roskomnadzor the following month. Previously, the Main Radio Frequency Center manually monitored the internet, the statement said, processing an average of 106 images and 101 videos per day. Okulus should allow this work to be industrialized because it can process “more than 200,000 images per day at a rate of approximately three seconds per image”.
Hunt for Putin memes
According to the Main Radio Frequency Center, more than 100,000 online resources were removed or disabled at the request of the attorney general’s office last year. Fifteen times more than in 2021. The publications concerned were largely labeled as “misinformation” about the war in Ukraine. “Visual content is mainly used by anti-Russian sources,” the Roskomnadzor branch criticized in government newspaper Rossiïskaïa Gazeta (in Russian), “because it creates a greater impression on users.”
“This system is our response to anti-Russian provocations and actions by foreign agents.”
The main Russian radio frequency center
at Rossiyskaya Gazeta
The proponents of the system assure that the data is finally checked by humans to avoid misjudgments. They also promise that the data will not be shared with law enforcement agencies for possible prosecution. However, Okulus will likely target the slightest protest.
In particular, Important Stories journalists discovered that the oculus system intended to track offensive comments and memes about Vladimir Putin. This point appeared in an attachment to the largest leak of documents in Roskomnadzor’s history last November. This made it possible to identify other media cop tools, including “bot” farms that impersonate social network users to infiltrate private groups.
The Kremlin dreams of controlling the Russian network
At this point, experts are still divided on the actual effectiveness of oculus. Last August, this project received funding of 58 million rubles (730,000 euros), a relatively modest sum for a project with such ambitions. The development time is also very short.
“We therefore have to put these often spectacular speeches into perspective, which often lead to little.”
Kevin Limonier, Lecturer at the French Institute of Geopolitics
at franceinfo
By 2025, Okulus aims to integrate new categories as well as improvements to analyze more complex documents (drawings, handwritten texts, etc.). This system is designed as a weapon to “control the upper layers of cyberspace, where information circulates,” specifies Kevin Limonier. But Russia is also trying to develop tools to “control the lower layers, i.e. the Internet flows themselves”. The Kremlin has dreamed for years of enjoying total digital sovereignty by creating a “Rusnet” separate from the global Internet.