One evening in August 2018, 21-year-old Mikhail Aksel stepped into the imposing marble of Moscow Metro’s Sportivnaya station. Aksel, a senior activist in The Other Russia, a small but flamboyant opposition party associated with the former punk and far-right nationalist writer Eduard Limonov, was no stranger to run-ins with the police. Even so, Aksel was surprised when a policeman approached him in the station and asked to see his documents. He was informed that the station’s security systems had identified him as a wanted criminal.

When Aksel protested that he had done nothing wrong, he was escorted into the station’s police office and shown an onscreen profile which detailed his name, date of birth and address. The profile showed  no case number, no investigating officer and no charges. The only other information given was that Aksel’s name had been added to the system’s database by an officer at the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Center for Combating Extremism.

“Look,” Aksel recalls the policeman telling him, “if it were just an administrative arrest, your details would be shown here in gray. But here they are highlighted in red, and with a warning alert.” After a hurried phone call, however, Aksel was free to go.

Though he hadn’t realized it, Mikhail Aksel had stumbled across Russia’s embryonic facial recognition surveillance system, a network of AI-connected cameras projected to soon be one of the largest of its kind in the world.