Digital surveillance: State Duma provokes public protests

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russian society is in a constant fever: in the shadow of the universal struggle against the virus, the State Duma is actively adopting laws that cause protests from the public, scientists, practitioners in the field of information security, personal and state sovereignty, and even security officials.

The "epidemic" that has covered the planet has set the flywheel of "expanding information surveillance" measures, which have unexpectedly been hailed as the most important sanitary protection measures. And this transformation brings to the fore the issue of protecting digital rights, personal freedom and personal dignity.

Today, the Duma in an emergency order (sometimes three readings in one day) has already adopted laws on the management of Moscow by artificial intelligence (AI) and on the creation of a unified federal information resource (EFIR); transferring the entire country under the control of AI.

As a result, citizens will turn, according to German Gref's definition, into “digital avatars”, and their data will become a profitable commodity, for the right to own which all spheres of business will fight. The Central Bank will be able to trade them with the help of Rostelecom, as well as a number of smaller banks from the approved list.

As a result, the state should become a digital platform controlled in blockchain mode by a powerful algorithm; public services will be exclusively paid and only in the "person - program" mode; paper documents and cash will disappear; and the electronic government will buy citizens' data from the Central Bank on a par with everyone else - albeit a little cheaper.

On the basis of constant monitoring and analysis of human life activity, AI will create a digital profile for each resident of the country, place it in a specific stratum (caste), create a digital trajectory of training and development for him, choose a profession and determine a career, monitor strict adherence to the plan and apply sanctions for deviating from it. It will be impossible to go beyond the scope of this course.

All this is stated in open sources, people can easily familiarize themselves with any document. Such pictures make any normal person want to wake up immediately, because if all this is true, then life becomes very scary. But why are we only frightened today, because the public sounded the alarm four years ago, when in January 2016 the World Bank published its high-profile report “Digital Dividends”. It described in detail how the whole world will start making money on information. And already in December, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, its permanent president Klaus Schwab proclaimed the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the mechanism of which he outlined in the book of the same name (The Fourth Industrial Revolution), and in which a new means of production and at the same time the most expensive the resource, "new oil", was the information. He said: “We are at the origins of a revolution that will fundamentally change the way we live, work and communicate with each other,” and added that we still do not really understand where we are going, but we are starting.

And now top managers, who correctly caught the smell of new big money, brought new banners from Davos to their smaller economic forums - the "gold rush" started, in which the winners were promised power over the whole world. This is how the “digital revolution” began, bringing with it the replacement of the moral paradigm of the world from the human to the virtual one.

In Russia, the Digital Economy project was adopted in July 2017 in an atmosphere of complete secrecy - until the very time when it was discovered by the public. An all-encompassing, coherent, logical, methodically and carefully constructed document suggested a large team of developers, a long period of creation and overseas authorship.

The term “digital economy” was introduced into the lexicon of society back in 1994 by one of the world's most famous authorities in the field of business strategies, an independent consultant, head of the International Research Center “New Paradigm” (1993) Don Tapscott in his book of the same name.

He is credited with the authorship of the blockchain technology (a distributed data registry that abolishes the centralization of control of any process), which was designated as one of the key mechanisms of the new "economic" formation, and also, by a "strange coincidence", he is also a senior adviser to the WEF in Davos.

But it is unlikely that the revolution in the field of technology was made by "a Canadian bachelor in psychology and statistics, a master of pedagogical sciences, an honorary doctor of legal sciences, a teacher and a musician" - rather, we are talking only about the broadcast of "necessary" ideas, and he is just a "talking head", albeit quite gifted, who voiced the innovation created at the next "thought factory". At least, his unlimited support at the global level suggests just such thoughts.

And the goals of his activities are truly universal - to change the structure of the whole world: in his other book, "Paradigm Change", he claims that the Internet should become the basis of everything - there should appear "network generation", "network consciousness", "network interaction", "network intelligence”,“network transparency”,“network availability”, and as a result, there will come an unprecedented prosperity for digital business.

Of course, this fascinates the reader, but translated into the language of traditional human meanings, it all boils down to globalization, control of consciousness, control of behavior, control of information, control of life, abolition of privacy and, accordingly, the construction of a mechanism of unprecedented, all-embracing (global) power.

The artificial nature of the concept of "digital economy" is also indicated by the fact that there is no single definition of it all over the world - the participants in the process are invited to either choose from those previously formulated (among the authors - the Australian government, the World Bank, Oxford Dictionary, BCS, Great Britain OECD, Research Center The Economist magazine, IBM of the UK Government), or come up with something of your own.

Specialists in the field of psychotechnology are well aware that artificial (false) concepts, the so-called "newspeak", are created when it is required to manipulate the mass consciousness and deceive the protective mechanisms of society.

The public and experts actively opposed the hasty and secret adoption of the program "Digital Economy in the Russian Federation for 2017-24", seeing in it a threat to national security.

Their fears were supported by the Security Council of the Russian Federation, which emphasized in its statement that "new threats and risks to national security have emerged associated with a high level of import dependence of the domestic industry on foreign information technologies, with the development of methods for processing large amounts of data, with the country's integration into a supranational digital economy.", but the program was still accepted.

Its goals include replacing the state with an Internet platform; mobile applications as mechanisms of statehood; identification and auto-identification instead of citizenship; blockchain (decentralization of the economy and power) - instead of government.

"Electronic government" will be supported by the population at the expense of paid services; instead of cash, it is planned to introduce "cryptocurrency" ("bitcoins", "rootcoins", etc.), and remote interaction should become the basis of the life of society,for which biometric identification, universal genomic registration and genomic passport will be introduced.

In 2018, the National Program "Digital Economy of the Russian Federation" appeared - with a budget (in rubles) of 1.2 trillion, of which 3.04 billion was allocated to the directions "Information infrastructure", "Formation of research competencies and technological groundwork", "Information security" … It was also adopted hastily and secretly - the text of the document for discussion in the Public Chamber, the participants had to "get through their own channels."

Today, the digital economy has become one of the areas of our domestic policy, where a powerful budgetary river flows. The largest expenses are the development of communication networks, including 5G, as well as the introduction of platforms for working with data and their storage (627.9 billion); development of digital public administration (233.1 billion); training of personnel for the digital economy (138.9 billion); digital technologies - artificial intelligence, big data, quantum technologies and others (125, 3 billion). Least of all money was allocated for cybersecurity (18 billion) and regulation (1.5 billion), and in connection with the pandemic, it was proposed to completely cancel these two items of expenditure.

To create “digital law”, it is necessary to promptly train lawyers of a new formation. In 2017, the State Duma created an expert council on the digital economy and blockchain technologies; for the deputies, they organized courses on blockchain, launched an online service "cyber secretary", in which they were supposed to "share their experience in drafting laws on artificial intelligence with colleagues from 26 countries"; conducted a study of cryptocurrencies (2.5 million); a seminar was held on the topic of digitalization and the subsequent training of fifty deputies on the basis of the Sberbank Corporate University.

Intoxicated by unprecedented prospects, the deputies intended to create a federal agency for robotics and cyber systems, a separate ministry of virtual reality, etc.

At the parliamentary hearings in 2017, the president of the InfoWatch group of companies Natalya Kasperskaya said that the advertising hype raised around the next novelty often provokes a rush and thoughtless borrowing of unnecessary, and suggested "not to fall into" digital addiction "and not to borrow foreign technologies, but instead -" methodically develop and support our own companies and developments "".

And when the Duma announced the start of the development of the first fifty "digital" laws, ex-adviser to the President on the Internet Herman Klimenko commented: “I am a little afraid of the government's desire to adopt 50 laws. You don't need 50 laws! " It is important that it was he who earlier stated that “the digital economy is not about the economy at all, but about how IT specialists conquered the world”, and that for its implementation “it is necessary to adopt 100 new laws,” which he “prepared a long time ago, but in no way could not push anywhere."

The change in the rhetoric of the main ideologist of aggressive digitalization has shown that an alternative position is already beginning to form in the power structures, creating a system of balances and aimed at leveling the risks from the introduction of untested technologies. At the same time, the Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin compared "bitcoin" (digital currency) with the MMM financial pyramid.

But the process has already begun: the Ministry of Justice, together with the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Tax Service (FTS), at the same time began to create a Unified Register of the Population - despite the fact that the creation of unified databases is prohibited by law.

The basis for it was a single database of registry offices, starting in 1926, and the completion of the work was scheduled for early 2020.

In May 2020, the law "On a single federal information register containing information about the population of the Russian Federation" (EFIR) was passed with lightning speed. Despite the fact that scientists, experts, the public and even law enforcement agencies spoke out against it, pointing out the direct threat to personal and national security associated with its adoption, it was signed at all levels. Now each of us will receive a unique 12-digit irreplaceable number instead of a name (despite the fact that the replacement of a name with a number was condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal as a crime against humanity, not subject to a statute of limitations) and will become absolutely defenseless against the owner of the file with all the information about it …

In 2018, in order to “maintain the stability of the banking system,” the State Duma adopted a law on a unified biometric base, which gave banks the right to own biometric data of citizens, sell them to commercial structures and the state. Biometric templates (fingerprints, voice cast, photo of a face, irises, etc.) should be collected by banks and transferred to the Central Bank, which will sell them to business, security officials and the state, and the biometric system operator Rostelecom has already announced the price per person for business - 200 rubles.

At the same time, “representatives of banks, non-state insurance and pension funds, special depositories, as well as persons under whose direct control or influence they are,” are exempted from submitting their data - such is the overt division into whites and blacks. For ordinary citizens, there are no alternative options or options for refusal, and the duty to ensure data security is imposed on them by law.

In our time, it is not difficult to successfully falsify any data, and here the most serious question of “identity theft” is already raised, which has turned into one of the most widespread crimes in the United States and Europe.

And if we allow hacking of personal data of employees of secret strategic facilities, then information security risks turn into a threat of a nuclear apocalypse.

Russian citizens are in no hurry to voluntarily distribute their personal information, so in 2020 a bill appeared on the right of banks to compulsory collection of biometrics. This bill delegates the right of legislative initiative to the Central Bank, which means its legalization as a subject of legislative power - translation "de facto" into "de jure".

When we are looking for the reasons for the “digital” laws that are hostile to us, we must understand that they all appear not by themselves, but according to the previously drawn up plan of the Digital Economy program.

"Conducting a legal experiment and introducing special legal regimes in Moscow" (artificial intelligence management) was planned in it for 2018, was postponed to the fourth quarter of 2020, but thanks to quarantine, it got ahead of the curve in April 2020.

The law on artificial intelligence in Moscow has an indigestible name, but its goal is simple - to create a legal space on the territory of the capital, in which existing Russian laws do not apply, and life is built only according to “digital concepts”.

All processes of organizing city life (transport, housing and communal services, healthcare, social sphere, science, education, culture, economics, finance, all branches of government) will be transferred to artificial intelligence under sole control, and for its smooth operation our right to protect our own personal data, our privacy, personal dignity and freedom of movement.

At the same time, exceptional conditions are created for digital business in Moscow, and information that an entity is under special jurisdiction should be posted in a conspicuous place on its physical territory or virtual site (website). In order to get into the cohort of the newly elected, participants need to work in the field of computer technology, not be under investigation and be in a special register.

The transfer of Moscow, the country's most important strategic object, under the control of an algorithm - a program that works on the carriers of our geopolitical opponents - greatly exacerbates the issue of Russia's state security.

A well-known expert in the field of technology Igor Ashmanov openly warns: “We are told: these are advanced technologies, we urgently need to introduce them, otherwise we will be hopelessly lagging behind. Nobody is discussing why they should be implemented. When they ask the question: "Explain why all this is needed?", They usually answer the following: firstly, this is money, you can make great money on it, and secondly, you need to keep up with progress, otherwise we will lag behind the "developed "countries for hundreds of years. We see the performances of these so-called. "digital evangelists". Basically, these are marketers, bankers who do not understand anything directly in IT, they simply repeat what their consultants say, and the essence boils down to the same thing - all this must be implemented as soon as possible. But since we are talking about immediate implementation, it is clear that it is necessary to implement ready-made. And everything that is ready and working at the moment is American. Not even global, but American. This means that if we succumb to this fever, in 5-7 years the level of digital colonization of Russia will go off scale."

A set of digital laws is progressively building digital power, which will be received by certain persons who are not bound by the oath and responsibility for divulging secrets, to whom the citizens of Russia did not transfer this power, and it would be naive to think that we are talking about the Government or individual ministries.

The program "Digital Economy" is, indeed, "not about the economy" - it is about another life, another world, other meanings, and it's time to carefully understand its content.

We are offered cryptocurrency bitcoin made by foreign intelligence and controlled by foreign exchanges, e-commerce from Alibaba, taxi from Uber, "social rating" from China.

In 2018, Deputy Prime Minister Maxim Akimov at the Sberbank Data Science Day conference, speaking about the Chinese system of "social credit" (the state's assessment of citizens on the basis of continuous monitoring using artificial intelligence of their political and social behavior and their subsequent stratification, which determines access to social benefits and preferences or blocking it), said: "I believe that this is a rather clear threat, I feel this threat, but, referring to societies with a classical humanistic tradition, we will be able to avoid this threat." The society also hopes for this, but only in May 2020, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced its intention to create a social rating for migrants - does it mean that the running-in has already begun?

And the deputy of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications A. Kozyrev said two years ago: “It will take 10-20 years, and a new preventive measure will appear in the Criminal Code - deprivation of the right to electronic identification for a period of, say, three years. This will be the worst punishment. Now we are thinking whether it is possible to remove the citizen, and then we will think: "Lord, if only I was not removed from this system!" This is how it will be!"

It is unlikely that officials of this level allow themselves to simply fantasize in the media on a given topic. And the representative of VTB Bank, Mr. Verkhoshinsky, painted a picture of a bright future as something not discussed and taken for granted: “Soon it will be so that a person is walking down the street, and all systems will recognize him, and this is already a practical and tangible technology”.

The Digital Economy program provides for the abolition of not only personal, medical and family secrets - one of the sections provides for the abolition of cartographic and state secrets. Can we continue to take this lightly?

Yes, there is a technology race, there is a business desperately trying to grab a fatter piece of the pie of a promising new market, but there is also a state. How are the interests of these parties linked, and what exactly do we need in this race?

It is important, after all, not who invented, but who controls - who exactly are these consultants who influence the adoption of government decisions in the field of IT, and whose interests and wishes do they promote?

And it is worthwhile to sort out our state goals - what is progress for us, what is the real leadership, and what we put at the forefront in determining our path.

Meanwhile, on the International Children's Day, the Council of Europe introduced a new dominant to the world - it released a brochure for children "Learn about your rights in the digital environment", with a list of rights that they "can demand from governments, schools, companies and other stakeholders." … The authors also announced a Digital Parenting Guide and a Guide for Policymakers on the Rights of the Child in the Digital Environment.

It is worth recalling that in a number of international documents the Internet has already been named a basic value, for the deprivation of the right of access to which serious sanctions are assumed.

Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev in his recent programmatic article "Does Russia need" universal "values?" stated that in a situation of “an endless hybrid war aimed at eroding the traditions of different peoples, their language, faith and historical memory of generations, which have developed over the centuries,” Russia proposes “a new civilizational choice, the construction of national sovereignty, including cultural and spiritual and moral, in the status of the greatest value and the basis for the subsequent construction of human civilization."

And it's time to finally answer the question of how the assignment of a number instead of a name, human-tracking cameras on the streets, fingerprints in a store and an ATM, digital passes and QR codes, social monitoring and social loans, a comprehensive personal data base, overseeing “Digital avatars” artificial intelligence are combined with this clearly formulated spiritual and moral paradigm of our country.

Russia will be saved only by the statist thinking of politicians, officials and businessmen, based on traditional moral values.

Without this, neither technology nor the army will protect us - in the war against humanity and humanity, the front line runs inside each of us.