Evgenia Kotliar is a correspondent for Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin extended Russia’s COVID-19 lockdown until the end of the month, Moscow city officials on April 2 began to release a tracking app, Social Monitoring, that will allow them to determine whether coronavirus patients remain in self-isolation. Opposition and civil rights activists have denounced the technology for violating privacy rights. To date, Russia has reported 3,548 coronavirus cases and 30 deaths, the highest numbers in its region.
His case has become arguably one of the best known among the dozens of prisoners arrested on criminal charges during Moscow’s chaotic summer of election protests. Now freed from prison, Pavel Ustinov, a 23-year-old Russian actor, told Current Time that he intends to take to the streets to rally for the freedom of other protest prisoners.
As this summer's protests showed, Moscow's camera surveillance systems are becoming more sophisticated and more widespread. They're now known as an "all-seeing eye." What these cameras could mean for ordinary citizens’ civil rights concerns many.
