Officially, the objective is to combat violations of Russian law, but above all this instrument marks a new stage in web surveillance.
Russian censorship has a new tool. Roskomnadzor, the media and telecommunications policeman, announced on Monday February 13 that he had deployed a system called “Okulus” in order to track, in an automated way, the images broadcast online. This software, developed at its request by the Main Radio Frequency Center, a service under the supervision of Roskomnadzor, will accelerate the targeting of visual content that violates Russian legislation: extremist theses, calls for illegal demonstrations, incitement to suicide and the use drugs, and LGBT propaganda.
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“This announcement marks a step forward in the massification of censorship, with an automation of control”comments Kevin Limonier, lecturer at the French Institute of Geopolitics. Okulus is based on a network of neurons, exercised by automatic learning, and mobilizes around fifty servers equipped with graphic accelerators. It analyzes web pages, as well as social network profiles, to establish a classification, according to previously defined criteria.
“Russian censorship is still carried out under the guise of a virtuous struggle. Officially, Twitter is slowed down or blocked for stories of child pornography.”
Kevin Limonier, lecturer at the French Institute of Geopoliticsat franceinfo
This system was first tested in December, before being integrated the following month into the monitoring tools already used by Roskomnadzor. Previously, the Main Radio Frequency Center manually monitored the web, the statement said, and processed an average of 106 images and 101 videos per day. Okulus should make it possible to industrialize this work, because it will be able to process “more than 200,000 frames per day, at about three seconds per frame”.
Hunt down Putin memes
Last year, says the Main Radio Frequency Center, more than 100,000 online resources were removed or blocked at the request of the Attorney General’s office. Fifteen times more than in 2021. The publications concerned, for the most part, were described as “false information” about the war in Ukraine. “Visual content is particularly used by anti-Russian sources”denounces the Roskomnadzor branch to the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta (in Russian), “because they make a bigger impression on users”.
“This system is our response to anti-Russian provocations and actions by foreign agents.”
The Main Russian Radio Frequency Centerat “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”
The promoters of the system assure that the data will be checked lastly by humans, in order to avoid errors of appreciation. They also promise that the data will not be passed on to law enforcement for possible prosecution. Okulus, however, is likely to target the slightest seed of protest.
The journalists of Important Stories (in English) discovered in particular that the Okulus system planned to track insulting comments and memes about Vladimir Putin. This point appeared, spelled out, in an appendix to the biggest leak of documents in Roskomnadzor’s history, dated last November. This had made it possible to identify other tools used by the media policeman, including “bot” farms imitating social network users, in order to infiltrate private groups.
The Kremlin dreams of controlling the Russian web
At this stage, experts are still divided on the real effectiveness of Okulus. Last August, this project won funding of 58 million rubles (730,000 euros), a relatively modest sum for a project displaying such ambitions. The development time is also very short.
“We must therefore qualify these speeches, often spectacular, which often lead to little.”
Kevin Limonier, lecturer at the French Institute of Geopoliticsat franceinfo
Okulus aims to integrate new categories by 2025, 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”, says Kevin Limonier. But Russia is also trying to develop tools to “control the lower layers, i.e. the internet flows themselves”. The Kremlin has cherished the dream, for years, of enjoying total digital sovereignty, by creating a “Rusnet” separate from the global Internet.