Electronic surveillance

As Moscow goes high-tech, so does its surveillance system

From a boardroom in Moscow, I watched remotely by television as a security camera mounted by my apartment over four miles away swiveled over the street where I live and then began to zoom in on a neighbor’s window. Luckily, he’d closed his blinds that day.  

“Zoom in . . . just not toward the apartment,” said Alexander Gorbatko, Moscow’s deputy head for information technology, directing an aide who was taking me on a digital tour of Moscow. To me, he said, “As you can see, the system works everywhere.”

Moscow is plowing billions of dollars into reinventing itself as a modern, tech-friendly European city, and its system of remote surveillance is also ballooning. Over the past six years, the city has contracted with telecommunications operators to install more than 130,000 cameras, many of them boasting high resolution, zoom and swivel functions, and an uplink to a centralized database accessed by 16,000 municipal, regional and federal officials, including 6,000 law enforcement officers.